In his little book on “the ontology of film,” Stanley Cavell imagines that photography satisfied “the human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation—a wish for the power to reach this world, having for so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another” (21). Individuality had become isolation, consciousness came unhinged from the world, and philosophy had to renounce a concern with the things. From outside the field of philosophy, photography’s pictorial realism embodied a new solution, both aesthetic and technological, to a centuries-old philosophical problem that thought itself was no longer capable of resolving. Now from within the field of philosophy, for the last decade or so, a group of philosophers has been attempting a specifically philosophical solution, speculative realism.
 
Speculative realist philosophers challenge the necessity, even the propriety, of philosophy’s renunciation. Citing the rampant decadence of “postmodern skepticism” and the small-mindedness of analytical philosophy’s concern with mind, these philosophers amplify, transform, radicalize, and exalt in Husserl’s famous slogan, “back to the things themselves!” This movement has gone under a few different names, but has settled on speculative realism after a 2007 conference of that name. It has become institutionalized enough that two new volumes propose to evaluate where it is and how it got there: Graham Harman’s collection of essays and lectures, Towards Speculative Realism (Zero Books, 2010), and an anthology edited by Levi Bryant and Nick Srnicek along with Harman, The Speculative Turn (re.press, 2011).
 
My agenda in this review essay is twofold: to evaluate the broad contours of speculative realist thought as they are presented in these two volumes, focusing on two exemplary philosophers in particular, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux; and to show that, however far removed from—even antagonistic to—the concerns of aesthetic, political, and cultural criticism speculative realism may be, it has significant if unexpected stakes for contemporary critical theory. Speculative realism explicitly rejects what I want to call the “humanistic” concerns of much of contemporary continental philosophy and its inflection in critical theory of the sort practiced in literature, film, art, and cultural studies departments. But the terms of this rejection, and the problems it entails or discloses, are instructive for those of us whose speculative practices take place within the domains of culture and the arts. In particular, the deep but perhaps obscure affinity between speculation and aesthetics in speculative realism can serve as an opportunity to reopen, and possibly to transform, our ways of understanding our own critical work and the kind of traction it can have on cultural and aesthetic objects.
 
Graham Harman is easily the most readable of the speculative realists, and TowardsSpeculative Realism is particularly readable. It is a collection of lectures and previously unpublished essays from 1997 through 2009. The great virtue of this book is as an introduction to Harman’s thought, and to his object-oriented philosophy as a variant of speculative realism. It presents in redacted and often exploratory form many of the ideas that were the foundations for his monographs, including Tool-Being, Guerrilla Metaphysics, and Prince of Networks. In these books, he often presents his case as though he were reporting incontrovertible results–a style of writing and thinking that is likely a virtue in popularizing a philosophical position. However, because of this, his thinking can feel at times a bit like a conceptual machine which, once you turn it over, keeps going by itself until it runs out of gas (or you do). By contrast, because many of the entries in Towards Speculative Realism come in the earlier phases of his philosophical process, this volume presents Harman’s remarkably creative thinking less conclusively, in the course of its evolution over a decade. Less certain of itself, this work shows Harman asking, rather than answering, questions. While there’s evidently nothing new in a retrospective volume like this, both the proximity of different stages of his thinking and the substance of his style present his object-oriented ontology as a series of productive philosophical questions rather than inert doctrine.
 
The animating question of Harman’s philosophy is: what is the nature of an object? His way of posing this question is grounded in an unorthodox reading of Heidegger, worked out over roughly the first half of Towards Speculative Realism, although it is so foundational for Harman that some form of it is present in nearly every essay. While Harman’s philosophy passes through other thinkers—Latour, Whitehead, Islamic Occasionalism—his philosophical trajectory can be profitably understood as a progressive, radical rereading of 20th century phenomenological thought. This trajectory begins with a reading of the account of tools in Being and Time, laid out particularly clearly in “The Theory of Objects in Heidegger and Whitehead,” and “A Fresh Look at Zuhandenheit.” As Harman has it, “the scenario of the tool in Being and Time has nothing to do with the human use of tools, and everything to do with the tools themselves” (TowardsSpeculative Realism 24, hereafter cited as TSR). Or, in a slogan which appears in several essays, “The tool isn’t ‘used,’ it is” (TSR 7, 25, 46).
 
For Heidegger (the received Heidegger, anyway), any analysis of the world must take into account readiness-to-hand, presentness-at-hand, as well as their correlation. For Harman, this position is crassly anthropocentric. Readiness-to-hand does not name a special relation humans have to tools, but rather the available or disposable aspect of any object with respect to any other object. In “The Theory of Objects,” he develops this analysis with the example of a bridge:
 

Walking across a bridge, I am adrift in a world of equipment: the girders and pylons that support me, the durable power of concrete beneath my feet, the dense unyielding grain of the topsoil in which the bridge is rooted. What looks at first like the simple and trivial act of walking is actually embedded in the most intricate web of tool-pieces, tiny implanted devices watching over our activity, sustaining or resisting our efforts like transparent ghosts or gels.
 

(TSR 24)

For Harman, the tool—any given object—is enmeshed in a set of total relations (i.e. the world). Meanwhile, each object is visible only very partially from any given perspective. “The bridge has a completely different reality for every entity it encounters: it is utterly distinct for the seagull, the idle walker, and those who may be driving across it toward a game or a funeral” (TSR 25). The word utterly here is doing a great deal of work: the claim is that the relation between the seagull and the bridge is of a radically different, wholly unrelated, kind than the relation between the idle walker and the bridge.

 
This allows Harman to claim that “there is an absolute gulf between Heidegger’s readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand” (TSR 26). No matter how it manifests itself, the bridge (or any other object) itself is always infinitely withdrawn. Any relation a walker, a seagull, or a driver in a car may have to it always radically misses what the bridge is, in itself. And any relation, in any modality, we may have with a tool, whether it be practical or contemplative, aesthetic or empirical, also always radically misses the object. Harman’s object-orientation entails a concern with the “unchecked fury” of the withdrawn essence of objects (TSR 26). Doing justice to the object itself means affirming such fury, and also affirming that we never reach any object as it is in itself. But crucially, neither does any other object: objects are withdrawn from each other as radically as they are from us. The relation (or non-relation) between bolts and pylons is of exactly the same kind as between humans and the bridge: “all relations are on the same footing” (TSR 202). What’s refreshing about Harman is his insistence that bolts and pylons deserve as much or more attention from philosophers as the typical objects of philosophy: language, knowledge, mind, etc.
 
The obvious question arises of how objects can interact at all if they’re also absolutely withdrawn from each other. The second half of Towards Speculative Realism presents Harman’s development of this question as well as his solution: vicarious causation. As he has it in an essay on Husserl, “Physical Nature and the Paradox of Qualities,” “if hammers, rocks, and flames withdraw from all other entities, then it needs to be explained why anything happens in the world at all” (129); and “since objects cannot touch one another directly they must be able to interact only within some sort of vicarious medium that contains each of them” (TSR 131). Harman’s very weird but absolutely ingenious and elegant solution to this problem is that this medium is other objects. Relations themselves are objects. Take again the bridge example: its bolts anchor its pylons into its concrete foundation which is itself dug into the ground. These are all objects in their own right, never encountering one another, always infinitely withdrawn. But taken together, in their relations to one another, the bolts and pylons and foundation and concrete form the bridge itself—which is also wholly withdrawn, even from its constituent parts. It’s objects all the way down. Except there is no question of up or down—no level of reality (of scale, complexity, durability, nature, or physical existence) is any more essential or fundamental than any other: “an atom is no more an object than a skyscraper,” “an electron is no more an object than a piano,” and “mountains are no more objects than hallucinated mountains” (TSR 147-48). While the bridge is certainly composed of parts, the bridge itself is not any one of these parts, nor merely their sum. The bridge names the way in which its parts are related to one another, but it is not itself reducible to this bundle of relations.
 
Throughout, Harman’s ontology of an utterly pure, totally positive, completely inaccessible object licenses speculation as the only way we may ever reach anything like an encounter with the object itself. Since “there is no way of approaching equipment [objects] directly, not even asymptotically or by degrees” (47), the only way we have of thinking the withdrawn object or vicarious causation is metaphysics, “speculative theory on the nature of ultimate reality” (TSR 49). Two consequences follow from this. First, since we always miss the object, the ground for Harman’s theory of objects cannot be the object itself. This is a phenomenology without a practice of description. At no point does Harman ever really address himself to any object in particular, and it is not difficult to see why. At best we see his characteristic stylistic tic of what elsewhere he calls a “poetry of objects” (Prince 101-103): “monkeys, tornadoes, diamonds, and oil,” “hammers, drills, keys, and windows,” “trees, atoms, and songs. . . armies, banks, sports franchises, and fictional characters” (TSR 95, 97, 147). This is a poetry whose only device is parataxis. As poetic device, parataxis levels all differences between its terms—which, I suppose, is precisely the point. No object has any privilege or right of dignity over any other. But as a collection of essays (instead of a book on a single thinker, like Prince of Networks), Towards Speculative Realism makes particularly clear a resulting difficulty in Harman’s thinking. Instead of asking about any objects in particular, the essays all treat different philosophers and their theories of objects: Heidegger and Husserl, but also Lingis, Whitehead, Latour, and DeLanda. These are uniformly creative, opening these thinkers up in novel ways. Yet even in its object-oriented instance, it seems that the object of philosophy is really only ever other philosophy.
 
The second, related consequence is that in Harman’s case, the revival of metaphysics seems to amount to a revival of what Renaud Barbaras teaches us is the basic metaphysical mistake in “Phenomenological Reduction as Critique of Nothingness”: determining in advance that being must be purely positive by opposing it to pure nothingness. To maintain the form of being as pure positivity, Harman’s objects must be infinitely withdrawn as a matter of formal requirement. His position (and Towards Speculative Realism) begins with a formal determination of an object as a purely positive being, and the rest of his philosophy (and the rest of the book) unfolds in a frictionless universe of formal objects without qualities or air resistance, like high-school Newtonian physics. Harman develops his doctrine of vicarious causation because his theory of objects was obviously missing an account of relation or change. As we see in his progressive posing of the question of relation in Towards Speculative Realism, vicarious causation addresses a formal problem of a metaphysical system, but it does not seem excessively oriented by the need to explain any particular facts.
 
The benefit of Harman’s position is that it allows philosophy to speak of any and all objects, to become, that is, object-oriented. This does not come without costs. This philosophy can only speak of objects so on the condition that all such objects be any-objects-whatever, all fungibly withdrawn. It thus prevents any access to being itself except by means of the very faculty that determines in advance what will count as being: speculation. Meanwhile, phenomenality, our ongoing encounter with the world, teaches us that the world, and what is in the world, is, in itself, indeterminate, porous, incomplete. A more mundane phenomenology, like that of Merleau-Ponty, does not discover the absolute being that such speculation desires or demands. At issue is not realism per se, since Harman admits phenomenology is (or can be) realist. The issue is rather what you mean when you say something exists. Harman’s exuberantly maximalist position, from a certain angle, looks less like a realist return to the things themselves, as they are and as we discover them, and more like an ingenious philosophical revenge on the world for not living up to the disappointed expectation that being be pure and absolute, for its failure to satisfy Cavell’s wish. A thought which claims better fidelity to the things themselves ought not to work tirelessly toward a formal philosophical articulation of what an object is, both presuming and concluding that objects are all fundamentally fungible—or, what amounts to the same thing, all radically singular and wholly withdrawn. Rather than freeing us from anthropocentrism, such speculation can feel almost megalomaniacal, recreating the world in its own image.
 
Much broader in scope than Towards Speculative Realism, The Speculative Turn is a survey of current positions, trends, and debates in speculative thought. It is a much bigger and more difficult book. It consists of 25 entries over more than 400 pages, from the usual suspects of speculative realism (Harman, Ray Brassier, Levi Bryant, Iain Hamilton Grant), from frequent critics and interlocutors (Steven Shaviro, Alberto Toscano), and from stars of contemporary continental philosophy (Badiou, Žižek, Stengers, Latour). It is an impressive volume in its depth and vibrancy, and the interest of this volume for scholars working in the idioms of critical and cultural theory lies in no small part in the impressive intellectual creativity unleashed by a radical break from familiar styles and objects of thought. Moreover, it does an excellent job of collecting the multiple positions and styles of thinking on offer in speculative realist philosophy. It is less clear, however, what to do with those radically divergent positions and what the goal of such a survey is.
 
The book has the raw material to serve as an introduction to speculative realist thought (and then some), but its organization will not be useful to readers not already familiar with speculative realism. The editors have divided the book into five sections, which, oddly, are mentioned in the introduction but are not reflected in formal divisions in the table of contents or section breaks. They are “Speculative Realism Revisited,” then a folio on Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude, followed by sections on Politics, Metaphysics, and Science. These divisions do make some sense, but the ordering of essays is sometimes inscrutable. For example, Meillassoux’s contribution, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” which redacts and extends positions he presented in After Finitude, is placed only after the folio dealing with After Finitude. And even within that folio, Peter Hallward’s “Anything is Possible” is a clear and critical summary of AfterFinitude, is cited by every entry in the folio, and yet comes only toward the end of the section, the fourth of five entries.
 
Readers not already steeped in speculative realist thought would do well read out of order: the introduction to the volume; Hallward’s “Anything is Possible” and Nathan Brown’s response; Levi Bryant’s “The Ontic Principle”; Shaviro’s commentary on Harman, “The Actual Volcano,” and Harman’s response; and Harman’s “On the Undermining of Objects,” and Grant’s response. After that, many of the essays in the volume will be much easier to parse. (And some of them, no matter how brilliant, will be obscure without significant preparation in the history of philosophy.) The difficulty of ordering is perhaps unavoidable in a book like this. As is evident from their introduction, the editors of The Speculative Turn aspire to introduce these debates to a broad audience and to demonstrate their importance to the larger field of continental philosophy. The challenge is that the debates between the contributors are live and ongoing, have been for some time, and are still unfolding in these pages, as is evidenced by the number of responses included in the volume. It’s hard to stage an introduction in the middle of things.
 
At the same time, as a marker of its growing institutionalization, The Speculative Turn might also signal a moment of increased fragmentation in speculative realist philosophy. Speculative realism offers a great many different options, which share much more in what they reject than in what they affirm. And what they reject is what Quentin Meillassoux has named “correlationism,” or Kant’s critical legacy. As Ray Brassier has it, correlationism is “the philosopheme according to which the human and the non-human, society and nature, mind and world, can only be understood as reciprocally correlated, mutually interdependent poles of a fundamental relation” (The Speculative Turn 53, hereafter cited as ST). As the number of anticorrelationist positions grows, it seems that the feeling of being united against the pieties of both continental and analytical philosophy has become less urgent; Harman suggests as much in his entry. Nevertheless, speculative realists’ fractiousness has always been a hallmark of the movement, frequently invoked as evidence of its dynamism and importance. Such fractiousness is perhaps befitting a movement which rejects the last two hundred years of thought: these are people very willing and quite able to engage in heroic acts of disagreement. Paradoxically, when anthologized, such disagreement seems increased to the point of dispersal. This is particularly true with some of the entries from the better-known thinkers: the speculative realist core of this volume sits rather uneasily beside Žižek’s unsurprisingly full-throated affirmative answer to his titular question, “Is it Still Possible to Be a Hegelian Today?” That said, this feeling of dispersion turns on much more than the mere proximity of these essays, but is also a substantial intellectual matter.
 
Speculative realism of all flavors proposes to move past the Kantian inheritance of correlationism by insisting that philosophy must return to its pre-critical (pre-Kantian) vocation of speculation about the Absolute. Or the real. Indeed, the two seem to become equivalent. Bryant, Harman, and Srnicek acknowledge in their introduction that “this activity of ‘speculation’ may be cause for concern amongst some readers, for it might suggest a return to pre-critical philosophy, with its dogmatic belief in the powers of pure reason.” Continuing, they claim that speculation “aims at something ‘beyond’ the critical and linguistic turns. As such, it recuperates the pre-critical sense of ‘speculation’ as a concern with the Absolute, while also taking into account the undeniable progress that is due to the labour of critique. The works collected here are a speculative wager on the possible returns from a renewed attention to reality itself” (ST 3). It seems to me that it is not so much speculation or its promotion that should be a cause for concern, nor attention to reality, but rather the elision of the difference between the real and the absolute.
 
This elision is evident in the characterization of much contemporary thought as anti-realist. If “the basic claim of realism is that a world exists independent of ourselves” (ST 16), it seems a bit extravagant to claim Marxists are anti-realist, or phenomenologists, or analytical philosophers of mind, or even such much-maligned language-oriented philosophers as Derrida or Gadamer or Wittgenstein. And yet, the editors claim that a
 

general anti-realist trend has manifested itself in continental philosophy in a number of ways, but especially through preoccupation with such issues as death and finitude, an aversion to science, a focus on language, culture, and subjectivity to the detriment of material factors, an anthropocentric stance toward nature, a relinquishing of the search for absolutes, and an acquiescence to the specific conditions of our historical thrownness.
 

(ST 4)

A concern with finitude and death, or an investigation of (but not acquiescence to!) our historical conditions and conditionedness, aren’t on their face anti-realist, but are rather ways of reckoning with the real from our situation within it, of acknowledging our failure to know it as it is in itself, of coping with its recalcitrance and indeterminacy and excess.

 
The speculative realist asks us to leave behind what we think we know or experience of the real, for we cannot know this radical exterior, “the great outdoors.” Thus it becomes the task of speculation to think the real as the absolute. And ontology, understood as resurgent metaphysics, takes priority over epistemology. As with Harman, such a position obliges speculative realism to hold that there are no phenomenological or epistemological criteria by which we might evaluate such accounts of the absolutely real and their competing claims. This is the problem The Speculative Turn both presents and embodies. Since knowledge seems to be out of the question (or is just a boring question), the thinking on offer in this volume is by turns ingenious, athletic, and inspiring, or tortured, baroque, and impenetrable—and radically divergent. The disagreement turns mostly on the nature of objects and the nature of change, or the not-quite-parallel problems of relations vs. objects and process vs. stasis. Which is just to say that they argue a great deal about the nature of the real, as befits realists. It seems less clear what, exactly, their grounds for dispute are.
 
The folio on Meillassoux helps clarify these problems. It is the most unified portion of the book; all the essays deal with the same texts and problems, and it presents the greatest sustained encounter in the volume between speculative realism and its critics. Yet even here, these two camps seem to be talking past one another. Meillassoux’s philosophy itself helps make clear why that should be. Meillassoux, like Harman, holds that the ultimate nature of reality is beyond apprehension by knowledge, science, or the senses, although thought can grasp something of the nature of the things. However, for Meillassoux (in Hallward’s words), “the modality of this nature is radically contingent… there is no reason for things or ‘laws’ to be or remain as they are. Nothing is necessary, apart from the necessity that nothing be necessary. Anything can happen, any place and at any time, without reason or cause” (ST 130). Meillassoux is Hume’s wonderfully perverse heir; “Potentiality and Virtuality” is a reconsideration of “Hume’s Problem.” Hume famously observed that we cannot ever know the cause of an event, we can only induce it. Traditionally, Hume’s problem has been cast as a problem of epistemology: if we cannot ever truly know a cause from its effect, the question becomes what practices of induction can sufficiently underwrite claims to knowledge, especially scientific knowledge? But Meillassoux poses the problem, radically, as one of ontology, marshaling Hume to the conclusion that there is no necessity, that there is no reason at all, that things do seem to continue mostly as they are. The universe is absolutely contingent.
 
For Meillassoux, any change at all is always radically possible but never, ever necessary. The problem of how you can get from one state of affairs to its successor is a problem of merely ontic description. Metaphysics has nothing to say on the matter other than whatever rules or laws or conditions govern (or seem to govern) such unfolding are radically contingent. But this notion of radical contingency is so radical that it cannot get, in Hallward’s words, any purchase on concrete change: “Once Meillassoux has purged his speculative materialism of any sort of causality he deprives it of any worldly-historical purchase as well. The abstract logical possibility of change. . . has little to do with any concrete process of actual change” (ST 139). Responding to Hallward, Nathan Brown insists that this is no deprivation; rather, the proper domain of Meillassoux’s work is “the speculative.” Brown’s criticisms of Hallward amount (taken together, very approximately) to asserting that whatever flaws Hallward finds in AfterFinitude, they all consist in not following Meillassoux in strictly separating the empirical from the speculative, the ontic from the ontological. Which is to say, not following Meillassoux in affirming the absolute exteriority of thought and being. Everything in Meillassoux follows from this affirmation. And indeed, it all does follow. As with Harman, Meillassoux’s is a frictionless universe: once you accede to his first principle, his thought is compelling, convincing, and relentlessly consistent as a matter of doctrine.
 
Whereas Harman holds that we do not see the things themselves, as they are constitutively withdrawn, Meillassoux does Harman one better by claiming that the only way that thought can know ultimate reality is by sundering any correlation or contact between thought and being, only to reunite them in the media of pure speculation and an absolutely contingent contingency. His doctrine consists, in short, in a claim that in order to encounter the real, we must turn our backs on it: facticity distracts us from being. As Hallward contends, this is an “anti-phenomenological return ‘to the things themselves’” (ST 135). Retooling my objection to Harman earlier, you could very well suggest that, as Merleau-Ponty has it, the “thing itself” is only ever a postulate of thought (82). Objective thought mistakes being by falsely hypostatizing the object, replacing the messiness and finitude of the world as it is with the ideal purity of the absolute and the in-itself. It might then seem totally apropos to relegate the question of the things themselves to the realm of a pure speculation that has renounced any concern whatsoever with the world as it is. After all, the thing itself as absolute being doesn’t belong to the world anyway—it has only ever been an artifact of thought. Turning to absolute speculation on the absolute, such speculation misses the real it so desperately seeks.
 
I might be overstating the case, but this way of saying it articulates in no uncertain terms two related difficulties of speculative realism. First: What licenses the claim of speculation to articulate ultimate reality, the things in themselves, once it has rejected any form of correlation? What criteria are adequate to adjudicate the merit or correctness of the various speculative realist positions? If not mediated through experience, perception, empirical measurement, or some other contact with the world, what kind of relation can speculation claim to its objects? Not to put too fine a point on it: what are the grounds for deciding between the many competing speculative positions in The Speculative Turn? Second: What sort of difference does this philosophy seek to make? What is the relation of philosophy—understood not as the activity of pure speculation, but the activity of discoursing about it—to its objects and to the world? Or: what are the stakes of deciding between competing speculative positions in The Speculative Turn? Now, these sound like crassly correlationist questions, and awfully mundane ones at that. The first is a question of epistemology broadly, the second a question of the articulation of something as deathly boring as disciplinary norms.
 
These are questions about the nature of speculation in its conjugation by speculative realism. Of course, meditation on the nature of speculation cuts against the grain of the aspiration of speculative realism to break out of the correlationist circle and is much attenuated in TheSpeculative Turn. Attenuated, but not ignored. Ray Brassier and Adrian Johnston hit on the problem, and Alberto Toscano’s “Against Speculation” poses it most fully in his treatment of the account of speculation Meillassoux gives in chapter 2 of After Finitude. In Toscano’s words, correlationism “designates those structural invariants or transcendental parameters that govern a given world or domain of correlation without themselves being open to rational explanation, deduction or derivation. In this respect, facticity is a form of reflexive ignorance” (ST 85). The “strong correlationism” of Heidegger or Wittgenstein, or really, any anti-foundational philosophy that forbids or foregoes speculation on an ultimate reality behind facticity, is thus a “new obscurantism,” “a carte blanche for any and all superstitions” (ST 85). Strong correlationism is complicit with the rise of religiosity because philosophy has removed any vocabulary or grounds for discussing the absolute and irrational. Meillassoux’s brilliance lies precisely in the way his thought moves past dumb wonderment at facticity by ontologizing anti-foundationalism as absolute contingency. Here, realism and speculation license each other, and this is the crux of Toscano’s critique of Meillassoux. The absolute autonomy of the real, and its absolute exteriority with respect to thought, frees thought from the necessity of being a correlate of being. Yet once you give up any pretension to correlation between thought and being, how can you claim that absolute speculation will have any purchase whatsoever on the absolute of the real?
 
The questions of to what, to whom, in what modes, in what registers, and to what degree thought is (and ought to be) bound are questions that neither The Speculative Turn, nor speculative realist philosophy more generally, has quite known how to pose—even as it also makes them unavoidable. This inability is not unrelated to the uncertainty The Speculative Turn displays in the kind of impact it wants to have. The largely unvoiced question of speculation lies at the heart of what is both flawed and crucial about this volume.
 
If speculative realist philosophy does not quite have an account of how to answer these questions, it poses them in urgent and novel ways. This is not merely to recruit Harman, Meillassoux, and others to the correlationist concerns of critical, cultural, aesthetic theory (etc.), or of what Adrian Johnston calls “ontic disciplines.” But clearly the kind of purchase thought has on the world is of concern not merely to the speculative realists, but to practitioners of any sort of humanistic or critical thinking. You might even say it’s of greater importance to those of us who “do theory”: from a certain altitude, the “theory” that we “do,” wedded as it must be to an object or scene of inquiry, is the real object-oriented philosophy, speculative thinking that does not know how to get on without an object. The speculative realist demand to radically rethink this relation (or non-relation), and this dependency, is crucial. Whether or not you agree with Harman or Meillassoux, or any of the others, the charge from speculative realism to disciplines and practices of thought more bound to the things themselves—as we discover them in the world—lies precisely in their challenge to correlationism, that is, to our received ways of conceiving of the relation between thought and its objects.
 
In his contribution to The Speculative Turn, Steven Shaviro outlines the deep similarity between Harman’s and Whitehead’s ontologies, and then glosses his reason for preferring Whitehead’s relational ontology over Harman’s object-oriented one:
 

I would suggest that the contrast between Harman and Whitehead is basically a difference of style, or of aesthetics. This means that my enjoyment of one of these thinkers’ approaches over the other is finally a matter of taste, and is not subject to conceptual adjudication. And this is appropriate, given that both thinkers privilege aesthetics over both ethics and epistemology.
 

(288)

In the absence of positive criteria by which we can evaluate the merit of one position over another, the decision we make between them hinges on something that is not conceptual, or logical, or empirical, or rational. We can give reasons for these decisions which fall under any or all of those categories. But at a certain point, as with aesthetic decisions, rationality, even reasonability, must give way to a resonance that is merely felt, a certain this that seems captured by a philosophical claim whose grammatical form (“the world is like x“) might mislead us.

 
Installing aesthetics as the model for the relation between thought and world would seem to obviate the problem of the correlationist circle (or that’s what’s in the offing), since as Shaviro would have it, the kind of resonance at issue between thought and world on this model would not name a special form of relation between a subject and an object, but all forms of relatedness between entities. Moreover, this model introduces something like a kernel or splinter of the absolute into every relation of thought and object (or, for that matter, any object with any other). It stages, in miniature, in every encounter between a thought and an object, the kind of move Meillassoux makes at the level of ontology. No appeal to any aspect of the appearance of an object will ever be able, in the last instance, to found any claim about that object whatsoever, as it is in itself. Yet such a claim is not groundless, or irrational: you can always give reasons. (Although eventually, you can only just point or gesture: don’t you just see it?) And yet, since there is something fundamentally unaccountable in such a relation, it includes an appeal to something absolute—it is asserted, universally, without being subsumed under a concept.
 
This very well may look like an attempt to square the correlationist circle even while claiming to be outside it, reprising “postmodern skepticism” by denying that thought ever really grasps its object, staying comfortably within the navel-gazing domain of human culture, all while making rather extravagant appeals to first philosophy and metaphysics. By the same token, speculative realism, from certain angles, takes on an aspect of remarkable hubris, even megalomania, even as it claims to get us beyond self-involved anthropocentrism. Or I may seem to be attempting an accommodationist compromise by articulating a position in critical and cultural theory that isn’t undermined by the critiques of correlationism that found speculative realist philosophy, and from which seemingly antagonistic arguments about first philosophy, ontology, and metaphysics seem not just relevant but urgent. It’s possible that I am. In any event, my goal is to articulate a way in which speculative realism can pose a productive challenge to critical and cultural theory. Whatever the solution or resolution, its challenge consists in thinking in new and radical ways the importance, stakes, and force of speculative thinking within critical thought about art, literature, and culture. At a time like this, with the defunding or outright dissolution of institutional spaces dedicated to the practice of speculation, we need more and better ways to say how and why thought matters.
 
An open access PDF of The Speculative Turn is available for download on the re.press website.
 

 
It has been ten years since the publication of Global Hollywood, in which Toby Miller et al. characterize Hollywood not so much as a place but as a fundamentally international organization of cultural labor and resources. I mention this as a way of introducing Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, edited by Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover, for two reasons. First, like many of the contributors to this collection, I take art cinema as purposefully differentiating itself from Hollywood cinema. Global Art Cinema takes a bold step toward understanding art cinema as having the same order of ambition and scope as does its commercial alternative. But in approaching the world’s art cinemas globally, this collection faces different questions than concern Hollywood. Global Hollywood eschews formal analysis or textual interpretation in favor of critical political economy and cultural policy analysis. In claiming globality, Global Art Cinema is also forced to contend with the designation “art,” which evokes a long history of ideas regarding cinema aesthetics. Even if we understand “art cinema” as produced by institutional arrangements and critical discourses, its claims to “art” status typically rely on some aesthetic criteria. Indeed, we might even understand art cinema’s self-conscious formal deviations from Hollywood as part of its institutional differentiation from the mainstream.
 
“Difference,” then, is key to Global Art Cinema, and this point is forcefully elaborated in the book’s introduction, co-written by Galt and Schoonover. Drawing from the long and variable history of the type, it positions art cinema as an “elastically hybrid category” (3); the authors write that “the lack of strict parameters for art cinema is not just an ambiguity of its critical history, but a central part of its specificity, a positive way of delineating its discursive space” (6). Art cinema is thus a zone of cinematic alterity, which “always perverts the standard categories used to divide up institutions, locations, histories, or spectators” (6-7). Galt and Schoonover designate this internal difference as a productive “impurity” that destabilizes these zones.
 
This theoretical positioning could make the book appealing to scholars engaged in different kinds of cultural analysis, where there continue to be debates about “difference,” alterity, and hybridity; more particularly, it will interest those who are concerned with cross-cultural exchange. Although the book is centrally about cinema, its terms of discussion are relevant to debates in literature and art history. In positioning global art cinema as internally different or impure, however, Galt and Schoonover also contend with other descriptions of the world’s art cinemas; here I am thinking specifically of World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, edited by Nataša Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman. In the preface to that volume, Ďurovičová singles out the rhetorical and political valences of the term “transnational,” which she contrasts with the “global.” She writes, “In contradistinction to ‘global,’ a concept bound up with the philosophical category of totality” (ix), the transnational facilitates analysis and understandings of “modalities of geopolitical forms, social relations and … the variant scale on which relations in film history have occurred” (x). And it may be true that “transnational” has had more discursive purchase than “global” in recent scholarship, as scholars have looked for ways to describe the fluidity, mobility, and hybridity of contemporary culture in non-essentializing terms.
 
However, Galt and Schoonover’s use of the term “global” does not obscure the highly varied terrain or ideological complexity of the world’s art cinemas. Indeed, they make a compelling case for the geopolitical importance of art cinema. They assert that, along with their other impurities, art films are troubled and productively propelled by twin impulses to be different and yet also to be universally legible. Thus the punch line: “art cinema demands that we watch across cultures and see ourselves through foreign eyes” (11). In this formulation, art cinema does not make a claim of totality, but rather displaces us, dislocates us, and marks our lack of unification. Seen this way, global art cinema provides an exciting way to think through the heterogeneity of lived experience, making such art political as much as aesthetic.
 
With these stakes set, Global Art Cinema makes a substantial contribution to contemporary film scholarship in general and to scholarship about the world’s art cinemas in particular. In addition to the Introduction, it features twenty new essays as well as a brief but characteristically insightful Forward by Dudley Andrew. Although there is some variability in the chapters’ aims and complexity, they are consistently cogent in their arguments and accessibly written. The book is divided into four Parts: 1: Delimiting the Field, which “outlines new shapes and boundaries for art cinema” (21); 2: The Art Cinema Image, which analyses “the art in art cinema” (22); 3: Art Cinema Histories, which complicates “the conventional trajectory of film historiography that installs postwar European cinema as the predominant aesthetic and industrial basis around which other art cinemas develop” (23); and finally 4: Geopolitical Intersections, which undermines the Eurocentrism of conventional descriptions of art cinema. And although the essays within each section contribute to the larger topics, I want to suggest a number of other through-lines that occur in the book, as this volume takes up, continues, and alters a number of conceptual issues that have characterized discourses about art cinema for some time. These include a mobilization of “the auteur” as a critical frame, an attention to film form and style, a contrasting interest in institutional and industrial questions, flirtations with cultural elitism and, by contrast, essays that explicitly seek to undermine the loftiness of “art cinema.”
 
One of the longstanding features of art cinema has been an alignment with the auteur, and this volume demonstrates an ongoing interest in discussing specific film directors as coherent figures that help organize discourse about film. While some of the essays analyze particular directors as a matter of course, others are more reflective about the ways in which auteurs get created as such. In her contribution to the book, Manishita Dass discusses Ritwik Ghatak, whose career history has generally been overshadowed by Satyajit Ray, but who also has been intermittently “rediscovered” by various critics. Dass explains why this has happened, asserting that Ghatak’s idiosyncratic style, which fuses melodramatic excess with political commentary regarding the partition of India and Pakistan, has made him difficult to comprehend or categorize. Ultimately, for Dass, the case of Ghatak compels us to broaden our notions of “art cinema” by reconfiguring the “global” through a new openness toward the local and the regional. Jihoon Kim’s essay, on the other hand, compares the feature films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul with his video installation works. Kim asserts that Weerasethakul, like a handful of other artists, creates bridges between these two forms and in fact develops a “cinematic” style of installation art while simultaneously invigorating his features with an installation-inspired sense of time and place.
 
In looking at these non-European directors, both Dass and Kim demonstrate the expansion of auteurist analysis outside of Europe. Jean Ma takes up the issue of Eurocentrism in her essay, which looks at the films of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang. Ma asserts that Tsai’s films provide means for reassessing the Eurocentrism of conventional art cinema historiography through the director’s accumulation of references to his previous films and overt dramatizations of cross-cultural encounters. In a somewhat similar vein, Rachel Gabara discusses Abderrahmane Sissako, a director who was born in West Africa, educated in Moscow, resides in France, and yet returns to Africa to make his films there. Gabara asserts that Sissako’s films blur boundaries between “Second” and “Third Cinema,” and that he expands the possibilities for revolutionary films beyond these categories. Dennis Hanlon uses Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés toward similar ends in his essay, “Travelling Theory, Shots, and Players: Jorge Sanjinés, New Latin American Cinema, and the European Art Film.” Hanlon shows how Sanjinés critiques both Hollywood and European art cinema, and further, deviates from much of what is considered “Third Cinema,” as the director tries to create beauty as well as inspire his viewers toward political liberation. Hanlon argues that in his attempt to create a populist cinema that speaks to Bolivian workers, the director undermines the individualism normally associated with auteurist analysis.
 
In conventional international cinema scholarship, certain directors have become emblematic of entire national traditions and styles; Ingmar Bergman’s relationship with Swedish cinema is one of the most prominent examples. Patrick Keating contends with this conflation of artist and nationality in his essay, which examines films directed by Emilio Fernádez and Luis Buñuel, both of whom won awards for films they directed in Mexico. These films were both shot by cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Keating shows how Figueroa’s “national” style of cinematography was framed differently in a transnational context, in part depending on the director he was working with and also depending on how European critics wanted to frame “Mexican-ness” vis-à-vis world cinema. John David Rhodes’s “Pasolini’s Exquisite Flowers: The ‘Cinema of Poetry’ as a Theory of Art Cinema” likewise reframes an auteurial position. Instead of looking at the director’s films, Rhodes provides a detailed and insightful analysis of one of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s theorizations of film aesthetics. Rhodes makes a compelling case that, first, when Pasolini talks of a “cinema of poetry,” he refers to the corpus that others have designated with the phrase “art cinema.” Second, Rhodes asserts that Pasolini’s characterization of art cinema is implicitly political. Specifically, in Rhodes’s treatment, for Pasolini film style reflects class consciousness. (This assertion strikes me as quite strong, particularly when thinking about Porcile [1969], and the radically different styles that characterize the film’s two narrative lines.)
 
Rhodes’s essay is connected to a discussion of film form and style that occurs in many of the essays in Global Art Cinema. Of course, the role of formal analysis has been strongly debated in film scholarship for some time. David Bordwell stands as the figurehead of the contemporary “neo-formalist” approach, which vehemently disengages from textual analysis and interpretation. Bordwell was also among the first to designate a frame for analyzing art cinema in general, and, not surprisingly, he drew upon films’ formal features to organize the type. Mark Betz engages Bordwell’s notion of “parametric” cinematic narration, observed in films by such directors as Mizoguchi Kenji and Robert Bresson. Betz re-theorizes and relocates this “tradition” to include a number of directors from South America and the Middle East, among other regions. To get there, Betz closely examines formal, stylistic features of these films, but unlike Bordwell, is adamant that film form only matters to the extent that it is legible to a social public of viewers.
 
Thus not all formal analysis falls under the “neo-formalist” umbrella, nor does attention to film form necessitate that one disengage from interpretation, be it ideological, psychoanalytic, cultural, or inter-medial. In his essay, Adam Lowenstein suggests textual alignments between Un Chien Andalou (1929) and eXistenZ (1999) in order to show the ways in which both films relate to interactive gaming, specifically through their respective uses of surrealist logics. Angela Dalle Vache also takes up linkages between art cinema and surrealism in her essay “Surrealism in Art and Film: Face and Time.” She argues that, in order to better understand the cinematic techniques of directors Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, “we must return to the histories and aesthetic concerns of the historic avant-garde” (181).
 
Combining an analysis of film form with a rigorous engagement with critical theory, Angelo Restivo provides a wonderfully unexpected description of film history in his essay, “From Index to Figure in the European Art Film: The Case of The Conformist.” Restivo argues that the particularly “plastic” images of The Conformist anticipate the odd surfaces of postmodern commercial culture. The film deviates in its politics, however, through its representation of repressed queerness. Along these lines, Maria San Filippo makes a case for the representation of bisexual and/or bi-suggestive spaces in art cinema. Due to the tendency to be ambiguous typical of art cinema more generally, she asserts that such films reveal “how we might undo compulsory monosexuality and unthink heterocentrism” (89). Along a different tack, E. Ann Kaplan explores film style closely in her discussion of affect in cinema to show “how cinema structures screen emotions and look at techniques that produce emotions between embodied spectator and screen” in films by Werner Herzog, Claire Denis, and the Dardenne brothers (285). Kaplan discusses how different forms of postcolonial contact occur in and around these films to assess how these interactions are intertwined with emotion and affect.
 
Like these essays, Randalle Halle’s chapter looks at film form, but situates the formal conventions of contemporary European art cinema within an institutional frame. After detailing the mechanisms for European state support for media production, Halle delineates three aesthetic strategies of contemporary co-productions. First, “a multicultural logic emerged that consciously sought to undermine national specificity” (306). Then there was a “transnational scenario approach,” where the narrative “seeks to represent directly a quasi-transnational situation” (307). The third type, which began in the mid-1990s, disguises its transnationality by telling national stories from “non-national” perspectives.
 
Taking up questions of genre and national cinema through another institutional context is Azadeh Farahmand’s “Disentangling the International Festival Circuit: Genre and Iranian Cinema.” Following a deliberation on how the film festival circuits of the world work, she argues that specific film festivals led to the crystallization of two different Iranian film “waves,” which were programmed as such at subsequent festivals. Phil Rosen also focuses on institutional questions in his analysis of Sub-Saharan African cinema. Given the process of decolonization in that part of the world, and given the theoretical currents of that era, Rosen asserts that “African cinema should have emerged as a third cinema” (256). And although many films were aligned with the struggles of decolonization and postcoloniality, they took up formal devices that were more typical of “Second Cinema.” As Rosen indicates, this situation is fascinating because of the financing and exhibition infrastructures that undergird this cinema, which are typically located in Europe.
 
Moving away from conventional art cinema institutions, Brian Price’s chapter looks at cinema in the most rarified sites of culture, the museum and the gallery. Discussing works like Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, Price analyses and endorses what he calls “limited access cinema,” where works by fine artists are held outside the circulation of popular media (113). And although Price is conscious of his privileged place in making this argument, his essay raises the issues of elitism and anti-populism that have inflected the history of art cinema. David Andrews’s essay, “Toward an Inclusive, Exclusive Approach to Art Cinema,” takes what appears to be a diametrically opposed view, by looking at art cinema “in a contextual, value-neutral way so that it is truly inclusive, capable of covering all permutations, past and present” (64). He expands upon Steve Neale’s work on art cinema as a set of institutional practices, and advocates that “art cinema” should include the “highbrow” films from any number of other genres, including horror and pornography. In this, he looks at how certain films are considered to be of “high quality” through various paratexts and discourses.
 
This inclusive logic can be seen in Global Art Cinema itself. One essay that expands the boundaries of art cinema, in terms of formal features and cultural status, is Sharon Hayashi’s “The Fantastic Trajectory of Pink Art Cinema from Stalin to Bush.” Hayashi details the historical conjunctures of two pink films, Secrets Behind the Walls (1965) and The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (2004), with more conventional art films from the different eras. Rather than emphasizing formal similarities between these films, however, Hayashi shows that both pink films and more highbrow fare have been distributed and exhibited in similar ways. However, one can contrast Hayashi’s inclusion of “low status” films in the realm of art cinema with Timothy Corrigan’s discussion of essay films as a “cinema of ideas” (218). Marking out an insightful genealogy of the genre, Corrigan eloquently makes the case that essay films engage in a dialogic aesthetics, providing “an active intellectual response to the questions and provocations that an unsettled subjectivity directs at its public” (222). In this, the individual and the public come into contact, talk to one another, and think.
 
The contrast between these two essays demonstrates that Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories is indeed inclusive, ranging (at least) from an institutional history of soft-core pornography to an aesthetic analysis of films that convey ideas. The terms of “art” are certainly expansive here. Although some of the essays are quite focused on their topics, each evaluates how “quality” has been constructed in certain instances. David Andrew’s essay happens to be the most self-consciously broad interrogation of the “art” in art cinema. Inclusive, yes, but is Global Art Cinema global? In the sense put forth by the editors, it certainly is; it figures global art cinema in many of its diverse geographic, institutional, and formal occurrences, making it global but not universal. In strictly geographical terms, the book contains essays about regions that are not considered immediately within the conventional Euro-centrism of “art cinema.” Nevertheless, I wonder how this book’s aims and focus would shift had there been an essay about art cinema directors from the United States, such as David Lynch or Gus van Sant. Is American art cinema “global” in a different way?
 
But this objection is minor. Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories provides an abundance of thought-provoking essays. Looking at material from a wide variety of locations, the book offers an astoundingly broad snapshot of what has been called “art cinema.” Given that art films have, traditionally, formally deviated from Hollywood films, thus perhaps asking audiences to approach them with a greater sense of intellectual curiosity, it is not surprising that the essays in this volume are enlivened by a high level of sophistication. Looking at the world’s art cinemas has prompted these writers to engage in a world of ideas, which are a pleasure to explore.
 

 
Lynne Huffer’s new book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory, is a provocative contribution to what she calls the “Foucault machine”—that academic mechanism that is constantly pumping out new translations and new readings of the French philosopher. It serendipitously draws attention to Foucault’s first major work, the History of Madness, at a moment when the unabridged volume has finally become available to Anglophone readers for the first time. Foucault’s massive 1961 publication, although rarely read in its complete and original version, is usually acknowledged as an impressive work indicative of the great things that were to come from its author. At the same time, it is frequently criticized as an immature text that romanticizes and essentializes madness, makes an argument in 700 pages that might have been made in 200, unsophisticatedly approaches power as repressive rather than productive, and is marred by historical inaccuracies, drawing on literature and visual art rather than historical archives for its evidence. Foucault makes several autocritiques of the work in his 1973-1974 course lectures, Psychiatric Power, including a reproach of the 1961 book for being an “analysis of representations” (12). Huffer passionately and persuasively defends Foucault’s tome on many of these counts. Through thought-provoking discussions of Nietzsche and Freud, as well as an attentive reading of Foucault’s text, Huffer demonstrates, for instance, that Foucault already has a clear sense of the creative nature of power in 1961, that this work was already influenced by the genealogical Nietzsche, and that it contains a crucial and devastating argument against psychoanalysis that many queer theorists have been remiss to overlook in their cavalier comminglings of Freud and Foucault.
 
Beyond being an apology for Foucault’s early work, Huffer’s book advances the intriguing argument that the History of Madness is an ethical work, and that it should be read as an overlooked text in queer theory. In this way, Huffer effectively collapses the usual division of Foucault’s work into early-archaeological, middle-genealogical, and late-ethical periods. Huffer also challenges the received view that Foucault’s interest in the erotic came only late in his career. From his earliest major work, Huffer suggests, Foucault provides us with an ethics of eros in what should be seen as a foundational text in queer theory. We are reminded that in the fifties, when Foucault was writing the History of Madness, and in the early sixties when it was published (and on into the seventies), homosexuality was categorized as a mental illness. Homosexuals figure among the many victims of reason and confinement in Foucault’s work, along with prostitutes, libertines, and all the others who defied the ‘reason’ of Enlightenment family values. Foucault once said that each of his books is a “fragment of an autobiography,” and we may read the History of Madness as autobiographical in so far as Foucault was “mad” in a society such as ours if only (but perhaps not only) because he was gay. Huffer is surely right to point out that the History of Madness may be read in part as about the history of the experience of homosexuality and thus in terms of queer theory, although she may also overstate her argument in so far as “madness” and “sexuality” come to seem synonymous in her discussion.
 
In offering a new reading of the History of Madness as a queer text, Huffer also argues that we should read the History of Sexuality—a work which has already been foundational for queer theory—in a new light. She posits a number of correctives to the usual interpretations of the History of Sexuality. The first set of these correctives has to do with the failure to read the later work through the lens of the earlier work, while a second set has to do with what she sees as misunderstandings of the French text due to poor translations. Huffer suggests that if we understand the History of Madness as providing an ethics of eros, and if we note the continuities between this work and the first volume of the History of Sexuality, we will read the later work as an ethical text as well. Huffer similarly contends that if we appreciate the significance of Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis in his earlier work, we cannot set aside the more subtle critiques of psychoanalysis in the History of Sexuality, as some queer theorists have done by fusing Foucault’s thought with psychoanalytic theory. Huffer’s reading of the History of Madness thus calls into question current readings of the Foucauldian text that is currently most influential in queer theory.
 
In the second set of correctives, Huffer argues that the English translation of the History of Sexuality masks the manner in which Foucault had become a “master of irony” by the 1970s, in contrast to his lyrical style in the History of Madness. She suggests that Foucault is playful throughout the later work in ways that Anglophone readers have failed to appreciate. Huffer thus contends that American readers—and queer theorists in particular—take literally passages that were meant by Foucault to be ironic. More specifically, she argues that the central interpretation of the History of Sexuality as charting a historical shift from a juridical-legal control of sexual acts to a disciplinary production of sexual identities projects Anglophone concepts (such as American identity politics) onto a Francophone text to which such notions are alien, and also fails to grasp Foucault’s playful approach to history. Huffer thus rejects the “acts versus identities” reading of the History of Sexuality, arguing that Foucault never wrote about “identities” and was being ironic in the passage from which this reading is drawn. Huffer proposes that queer theorists have taken the History of Sexuality as a foundational text even while thoroughly misunderstanding its signification, and have thus built a discipline upon a foundation which her own reading demolishes. In this way, Huffer’s book aims to undermine the foundation on which queer theory was built even as it offers readers an alternative foundation: the History of Madness.
 
I admire the originality and boldness of Huffer’s attempt to offer entirely new readings of much commented-upon texts, and feel that she successfully reaches her primary goal: to draw our attention to the History of Madness and to provide an imaginative new reading of it. While Huffer’s discussion of the History of Madness may also persuade us to read Foucault’s later work in new ways, I think that the second set of correctives concerning losses in the translation of the History of Sexuality is less compelling. Huffer relies on her reading of the French original in her arguments about the History of Sexuality, but I would suggest that the French texts do not necessarily support her interpretations. For example, in Chapter Three, Huffer cites an interview in which Foucault says of the first volume of the History of Sexuality, “the mere fact that I’ve played that game [j’ai joué ce jeu-là] excludes for me the possibility of Freud figuring as the radical break, on the basis of which everything else has to be rethought” (qtd. 130). The first part of this sentence has been translated into English as “the mere fact that I’ve adopted this course” rather than “the mere fact that I’ve played that game.” Huffer argues that this translation obscures the fact that for Foucault the writing of the History of Sexuality “was a game” (130), much as she thinks that the English translation of that book more generally disguises the playful, ironic tone of the original French. In fact, however, “jouer le jeu” does not necessarily imply playfulness in French. A common use of the phrase is to suggest conformism: one is obliged or incited to “play the game.” In high school, a French teacher urged me to jouer le jeu because, she told me, I was “shooting myself in the foot” with my rebelliousness against school authorities. “Playing the game” was not comic or playful in this context. The French expressions for “the stakes” (les enjeux) and “what is at stake” (ce qui est en jeu) also involve the word “jeu” (game), but this does not mean that “the stakes” are always ludic. One might refer to “les enjeux de cette élection” (the stakes in this election), for instance, without implying that those stakes (health care, war) are comic and that the politicians are just being silly. What is “at play” could in fact be extremely serious, despite the word “game” in the phrase. “Enjeu” can be translated as “problem” or “issue” as well as “stake,” with no more playful connotations than in the English uses of these terms. The same can be argued about Foucault’s use of the term “les jeux de la verité” (truth games): the use of this expression should not be taken to mean that for Foucault truth games were always ludic. On the contrary, life and death can be—and, in Foucault’s examples, often are—”at play,” at stake or “en jeu” in these “jeux.” In another context—perhaps closer to the one in the interview cited above—I could be asked whether I’ve read Balzac and respond, “Oui, à une certaine époque j’ai joué ce jeu,” in order to say that at a certain time in my life I was engaged in reading Balzac. This phrase would not imply that I think reading Balzac is amusing or that I was just kidding around when I read it, nor does it imply that I am dismissive of Balzac scholarship. In suggesting that Foucault’s reference to “playing this game” in an interview implies that the writing of the History of Sexuality is something that Foucault “toyed” at, Huffer does not attend to the way this phrase functions in actual usage, and eliminates more likely interpretations. This example is typical of Huffer’s readings of French texts.
 
Beyond the translation of this sentence, Huffer argues that Foucault’s “Anglophone readers tend to miss Sexuality One‘s playful qualities” more generally:
 

That French-English interpretive gap is in part due to infelicitous translations of Foucault. And if every translation is an approximation, some renderings are more successful than others. The less-than-successful translations of Foucault miss not only differences of vocabulary but also a range of rhetorical locutions, grammatical arrangements, and stylistic forms of doubling such as alliterations….Translations of his work that miss his self-rupturing ironies will also miss important dimensions of those qualities that distinguish Foucault as a thinker.
 

(130)

Here Huffer risks setting up her interpretation as the master text, making Anglophone readers of Foucault doubt their ability to appreciate Foucault’s writings, or even to grasp what kind of thinker he is, reliant as they are on unsuccessful translations. By suggesting that the texts—and the thinker—are inaccessible to these readers, Huffer sets her interpretations of Foucault beyond challenge by some of her American peers. From here, she has the freedom to claim that passages in the History of Sexuality that contradict her readings are simply ironic in a way that monolingual Anglophone scholars cannot appreciate.

 
Huffer makes this kind of argument with respect to the passage where, despite his otherwise consistent critiques of the psy-disciplines, Foucault offers Freud some limited praise in the History of Sexuality. As Foucault writes:
 

the fact remains that in the great family of technologies of sex, which goes so far back into the history of the Christian West, of all those institutions that set out in the nineteenth century to medicalize sex, [psychoanalysis] was the one that, up to the decade of the forties, rigorously opposed the political and institutional effects of the perversion-heredity-degenerescence system.
 

(qtd. in Huffer 132)

In the chapter in which she cites this passage, Huffer is arguing that Foucault and psychoanalysis are incompatible. She does not want to hear Foucault saying anything positive about psychoanalysis, for which reason she wants to dismiss this passage as not meaning what it appears to mean. In fact, however, Foucault flags passages that he wants to be read ironically. For instance, in describing the repressive hypothesis, he provides indicators that his descriptions are ironic, such as “the story goes,” “it would seem”, “but twilight soon fell on this bright day” (History of Sexuality 3), and “This discourse on modern sexual repression holds up well, owing no doubt to how easy it is to uphold” (5). In contrast, there is nothing to flag the passage on Freud as ironic, and what Foucault says here is factual. Freud did reject the degenerescence theory of perversion in his published writings. This does not mean (as some may want to claim) that Foucault thought psychoanalysis was not all that bad. On the contrary, Foucault is simply exculpating psychoanalysis (up until a certain point in time) of one of the many vices of psychiatry. Psychoanalysis remains plagued by other vices, and this one exculpation does not mean that Foucault thought we should all flock into therapy.

 
It is true that Foucault is often ironic and that some readers sometimes miss that irony whether they are reading Foucault’s work in English or French. I have taught the History of Sexuality to a class of Francophone and Anglophone students, who read the book in the language they preferred. What I found is that Francophone students reading in French missed Foucault’s irony as often as the Anglophone students reading in English. This was not a problem of translation, but of careless reading. In the passage in question, far from being ironic, it seems to me that Foucault is simply acknowledging a fact about psychoanalysis in its first decades. This acknowledgement does not mean that he is a fan of psychoanalysis or that all his other critiques of psychoanalysis are invalidated. On the contrary, I agree with Huffer that psychoanalysis and Foucault are incompatible, and that this is an astute and significant challenge to queer theory as we know it. Huffer argues that readings of this passage that fail to see it as ironic “decontextualize Foucault’s typically ironic discourse about Freud in Sexuality One. Within the context of Foucault’s thinking and assertions about psychoanalysis over the course of his work, this passage can be viewed as a rhetorical trap where Foucault holds out the tantalizing lure of a Freudian ‘rupture’ that turns out to be no rupture at all” (132). This is a bad argument. Just because Foucault is ironic about Freud elsewhere, it does not follow that he can never say anything serious about Freud, or that if we don’t read irony everywhere that Freud is mentioned we are missing nuances in the French. The original French is not ironic on this point either.
 
Huffer’s argument about the supposedly ludic nature of the History of Sexuality as a whole is but one way in which she suggests that American readers have misinterpreted Foucault. Huffer also suggests that Americans have failed to realize that the History of Sexuality cannot be about identity politics because this is not a French concept—indeed the French see “identity” as a “specifically American obsession” (70). Huffer argues that the passage which primarily gives rise to the “acts versus identities” reading—the passage ending with: “The sodomite was a temporary aberration [or relapse into heresy or crime]; the homosexual is now a species” (History of Sexuality 43, translation modified)—should be read not as about sexual identities but as about sexual ethics, in light of her own reading of the History of Madness. However, there should be nothing forbidden about expanding Foucault’s argument in order to speak of the production of “sexual identities” simply because Foucault or the French more generally do not speak in these terms. This would effectively mean that we cannot use Foucault’s works as tools for our own political purposes, in a context where identity is part of our political vocabulary. In fact, Foucault precisely stipulated that his works should be used as tools for his readers’ political situations, beyond the uses that he originally imagined for them, or for which he wrote them. As he told Jana Sawicki, he did not want his readers to comment on his genealogies, and even less would he have wanted them to comment on his genealogies through the lens of their speculations on his sex life or their rummaging through the broken-hearted love letters of his youth (as Huffer does in her book). What he wanted was for his readers to write genealogies of their own and to use his genealogies as tools for their own political purposes. This is precisely what happened when Foucault’s writings on psychosexual taxonomization were taken up in the North American context of queer theory. Having looked closely at the original French, the English translation, and Huffer’s discussion of the small errors in punctuation, verb tense, and word choices in the passage cited above, I do not feel that there is any misguided leap taking place here caused by misunderstandings of the French language and culture. Nor do I think that we should be constrained by the original culture and context of Foucault’s writing, prevented from reading these works for our own political purposes.
 
Huffer also denies with respect to this passage on Freud that Foucault is drawing any historical distinctions, or that he saw the “sodomite” (as someone who had broken a moral or juridical law) as a pre-modern concept, in contrast to the “homosexual” (as a personage, species, character or taxonomical type) as a modern figure. As she writes, “There is nothing in Foucault’s analysis that excludes the possibility of medieval sodomites as ‘personages’ or Renaissance tribades as ‘characters’” (76). Indeed, Huffer denies that Foucault cares about historical chronology at all: “a linear time line is beside the point,” she informs us (78). Her explanation is that Foucault is again just kidding around when he talks about historical dates, and that he was once again being ironic when he says that the homosexual as “species” was created around 1870. Her proof of his irony is that, when Foucault refers to the 1869 article by Westphal that he says marks the beginning of homosexuality as a category, he calls it fameux, an adjective that she notes is heavily ironic. Yet the fact that Foucault uses an ironic adjective to refer to Westphal’s article might just mean that he found it obnoxious—it does not mean that Foucault’s argument in this passage is in jest. Again, from Foucault’s occasional use of irony Huffer generalizes to claim that Foucault is always ironic in The History of Sexuality. It is true that very often in his writings and course lectures Foucault makes a point of choosing a particular text or event more or less randomly as indicative of a historical change, and Westphal’s article may be a case in point, but he is, I believe, simply noting that he might have chosen another text or another event within that approximate period to make the same point.
 
In addition to raising these possible objections to some of Huffer’s key claims, some readers may find the mixture of biographical and autobiographical material in the long lead-up to the first chapter in “bad taste,” to use Huffer’s own expression (24). These pages mostly focus on information gleaned about Foucault’s erotic life and offer Huffer’s reaction to that information. Readers who do not have a tabloid reader’s interest in Foucault (or in his commentators) may be bothered by the paparazzi approach and the confessional style of these pages, and may want to skip ahead to Chapter One. I wanted to read Huffer’s book because I, too, am mad about Foucault—but I am mad about his ideas. Huffer, however, describes reading biographical information that Foucault wanted to suppress, as well as broken-hearted love letters that he wrote in his twenties (and surely never imagined would be used to interpret the book he was writing at that time) with voyeuristic glee. Her extensive exploration of such texts yields little insight that Foucault’s lectures from the same time period do not provide. In particular, there is nothing in the 1975 interview Huffer quotes that we do not know from Foucault’s contemporary course lectures, Abnormal. The point made (autobiographically) in the interview is that those deemed abnormal are isolated, pathologized, and psychiatrized, an argument he makes at length (non-autobiographically) in these lectures. For Huffer, this interview indicates that Foucault’s book on madness is in fact a monumental but coded volume in queer theory, grounded in Foucault’s sexual experience—a fact that he “confessed” to, immediately regretted, and attempted to suppress, until Huffer came across the “confession” in the archives and revealed it to the world. Huffer explains that what interests her about the interview is that she was reading what she takes to be a “confession” (23)—though we could contest this—from an author who avoided such discursive acts. Huffer is not the first to seek out, and to triumphantly claim to have found, a “confession” from the philosopher who refused confessions (we might also think of Butler’s reading of Herculine Barbin in Gender Trouble): this gesture—this desire—strikes me as violent, but most of all I was simply bored and irritated by the 55 pages of biographical and autobiographical material that preceded any serious discussion of Foucault’s philosophical texts. Perhaps we should read Foucault’s critiques of confession seriously in a way that might make us rethink the writing of confessional introductions such as Huffer’s. As Foucault writes:
 

One confesses—or is forced to confess. When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat; it is driven from its hiding place in the soul, or extracted from the body. Since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied it like a shadow, and supported it when it could go no further: the dark twins. The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession.
 

(History of Sexuality 59)

Huffer makes much of her tenderness for Foucault, but perhaps it is this tenderness that has led her to “drive” Foucault’s so-called confession “from its hiding place” in the archives, if not in his body or soul. She does this in a manner that, for Foucault, was not unlike the practices of torture. Not confessing, Foucault is forced to confess. Perhaps, just as Huffer argues that we need to take seriously the critique of psychoanalysis in the History of Madness, we would also do well to take seriously the critique of confession in the History of Sexuality, and indeed, to consider the ways that Foucault’s critique of confession and his critique of psychoanalysis are connected. Taking Foucault’s argument about confession to heart might lead us to resist our own compulsions to confess but, even more importantly, might also cast into question the desire (which is not Huffer’s alone) to extract confessions from those who do not give them freely.

 
One of the commentators cited on the back of Huffer’s book exclaims: “Lynne Huffer startles our complacent ownership of Foucault. Own him? We’ve hardly read him. Huffer has [and] [s]he shares the results.” I wonder who this “we” is to whom the reviewer refers: who thought we owned him? Who hasn’t read him? I am also afraid that the reviewer expresses Huffer’s own attitude: she writes possessively of “my Foucault”—”the one I am calling mine” (21)—and refers to Foucault’s texts using her own personal titles—Madness and Sexuality One—rather than the actual published titles that the rest of us use, again laying claim through naming to her own personal Foucault. Being the one to whom Foucault has made his long-awaited “confession,” however posthumously and against his will, is perhaps one grounds for this sense of ownership on Huffer’s part. This use of “my” may be innocent enough and even modest, acknowledging that her reading of Foucault is subjective, situated, and biased. What I fear though is that Huffer’s book implies that her Foucault is The Foucault, and that those who know Foucault in translation cannot get him. Huffer’s readings of the History of Sexuality remain at many points contentious, but they do not undercut the significance of her reading of the History of Madness or, for that matter, her important refocusing of our attention upon that text.
 

 
A few months ago a graduate student came to see me to discuss her section on postcolonial studies for her Ph.D. exams. Talking about the ways the Japanese colonial past continues to affect everyday life in South Korea, she reflected that, “this is what Hardt and Negri call the coloniality of power.” Taken aback, I said that she must have missed a citation or two and lightly scolded her that “coloniality of power” was a phrase post-Eurocentric scholars would identify not with European theory of the sort espoused by Antonio Negri, but with Latin American intellectuals such as the Peruvian Anibal Quijano, the Mexican Enrique Dussel, and the Argentine Walter Mignolo. I found myself surprisingly indignant, explaining that much of Hardt and Negri’s previous work—in their historicist mode of “identifying the tendency”—was generally opposed to the insistence by such Latin American subalternists that the colonial past continues to impact crucial aspects of our contemporary present, albeit on the new political terrain of democratic politics and pluralist institutions. Wondering how she had made such a connection, I went right to my unopened copy of Commonwealth when I got home that night.
 
As Michael Hardt and I are in a study group together and have mutual friends, I was at first relieved not to find any signs of theory looting after my hasty CSI (crime scene investigation) of Parts I (“Republic”) and II (“Modernity”) of Commonwealth. Indeed, the proximity of my UNC, Chapel Hill to Duke University where Hardt teaches (and where Antonio Negri appears virtually via videoconference on occasion) must have led my graduate student and her peers to assume that much of what is important in contemporary critical theory emanates from nearby Duke, the home of Italian autonomia in the Anglophone world. However, my relief only lasted through that initial speed-read. Returning to Commonwealth a few days later, my eyes stopped at a peculiar phrase, “the coloniality of biopower.” It appears as a section heading several pages into Part II, “Modernity (and the Landscapes of Altermodernity),” and builds on their earlier interpretation and appropriation of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. What they seem to mean by the neologism “coloniality of biopower” (hereafter, COB) is that modern power works on subordinated populations in ways structurally similar to the ways in which colonial power dominated indigenous peoples. Fair enough, I thought; let’s see how Hardt and Negri distinguish their COB neologism from the source concept in Latin American criticism.
 
Coloniality of power (COP), together with the correlate notion of “coloniality,” was originally deployed by Anibal Quijano in the early 1990s to designate the apparatuses of hegemonic power that first emerged during the modern period, the era of colonialism, whose long durée stretches from the conquest of the Americas to the present.¹ In the hands of Quijano and Dussel, to name only two, COP consolidates a power matrix that infiltrates the domains of political administration, social production, private life, and general epistemological world-view. The modern forms these practical domains have taken are the nation-state, capitalism, private property, the heterosexist nuclear family, and Eurocentrism. Different from the more familiar strain of Anglophone postcolonial theory, which tends to emphasize the fractured and filtered influence of the colonial past, Latin American COP insists that the material and ideological ciphers of modern colonialism continue to hegemonize the ways in which sexuality, race, labor, and humans’ relation to nature are lived and epistemologically grasped. In this sense, COP refers to a crucial structuring process in the world system that articulates peripheral nation-states in the global South to the modus operandi of the Euro-American North, resulting in a surprising homogeneity of race, gender, and labor hierarchies in North and South. Even in a postcolonial world, power remains colonial when it maintains the force to impose one Euro-American regime onto the rest of the world. Only through the dramatic overthrow of COP by decolonial thought and practice, Latin American subalternists argue, can the epistemic and material violence of coloniality be overcome. H & N’s concept of COB is, at first glance, a decoding of COP followed by a recoding of it through their loose rendering of Foucault, which I will discuss below. However, as I moved twenty pages or so beyond their invocation of “coloniality of biopower,” my CSI sensors came across the source phrase “coloniality of power” on page 103, with no citation. It appears later in the same chapter titled “Altermodernity,” once again without a citation. Somewhat agitated, I rechecked the footnotes in both places and found no citation—the theory commons have been looted.
 
The substantive “coloniality” appears throughout the two chapters in Commonwealth where coloniality of power/biopower is deployed. Beginning on the page immediately after their introduction of COB, “coloniality” is shorthand for the coloniality of power/biopower, appearing on almost every subsequent page until we reach 103, when coloniality of power is first expropriated and deployed. Although it might seem like reasonable shorthand for the cumbersome COB, it is also used in exactly this way by Latin American theorists, perhaps most significantly by Hardt’s critic and colleague, Walter Mignolo (Local Histories/Global Designs). In other words, when H & N introduce their reformatted notion of COB, it’s difficult not to see it as a kind of camouflage for the looting of Latin American critical thought; the proof of this can be found in the fact that their COB neologism is largely abandoned after the first few pages and replaced by the unsourced phrases COP and “coloniality,” now appropriated as their own theoretical property. This operation was apparently what convinced my graduate student that the phrase originated in the private enclosures of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.
 
What’s important in this ex/appropriation is that not only the expression, but the substance of Latin American critique has been theoryjacked. Whereas in their earlier work H & N configure colonial forms of power/knowledge as progressively overcome by the real subsumption of postmodern forms of rule, burying coloniality safely in the past without a trace in the present, in Commonwealth forms of coloniality continue to impact power hierarchies. Using a modernity vs. anti-modernity binary opposition, they write in their introduction of COB, “Antimodernity is held under control in the power relation of modernity not only through external forms of subjugation—from the slave master’s lash and the conquistador’s sword to capitalist society’s police and prison—but also and more important through internal mechanisms of subjectification” (77). Whereas in Empire their historicist theory of political rule (where colonial mercantilism is transcended by industrial capitalism, which is subsequently transcended by postmodern capitalism) largely prevents them from seeing the ways in which different and contradictory forms of rule can coexist in the same chronotope, in Commonwealth the plagiarizing of Latin American theory helps them configure the slavemaster’s lash as a homologue of contemporary prison structures, not as a linear, developmental sequence.
 
The substance of COP becomes an important vehicle to solve the problem of the tendency, the one acknowledged weakness in Italian autonomia. This is particularly intriguing in that Latin American subalternists were among the first to critique the vanguardism and Eurocentrism of Empire, attacking it as the newest version of Eurocentric theory focused exclusively on metropolitan centers while largely ignoring peripheral situations in the global South. The swift reduction of postcolonial theory to Homi Bhabha allows H & N in Empire to construe postcolonial thought tout court not as a critical enterprise more or less concerned with locating colonial-like structures of domination stubbornly residing in democratic, postcolonial situations, but as something both irrelevant in its flawed hermeneutic insistence on reading aspects of the past in the present and, downloading Arif Dirlik’s broadside against the culturalism of Anglophone postcolonial theory, complicit with and supportive of multicultural, postmodern capitalism.
 
Important Latin American critics have for two decades largely ignored the move to designate novel forms of political, cultural, and economic rule with the signifier “postmodern,” and instead have coined the phrase “modernidad/colonialidad” to underscore the different ways in which the colonial past remains present in contemporary forms of power. Although it remains largely invisible to the dominant strains of Anglophone theory and criticism, for post-Eurocentric scholars and activists “modernity-coloniality” has become an identifiable concept originating in Latin America that works to marginalize much of the Euro-American insistence on the radical newness of contemporary power. Modernity-coloniality research groups appeared in Mexico City, Quito, and in Durham (Duke) and Chapel Hill, North Carolina where Mignolo and the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar were the co-organizers of a group that I was involved with for several years. Michael Hardt attended at least two of their events.
 
The politico-theoretical intervention of Latin American modernity-coloniality builds on a variety of Latin American-based theories and practices: liberation theology of the 1960s; debates in Latin American philosophy and social science around ideas of liberation philosophy and autonomous social science centered on people like Dussel, Rodolpho Kusch, and Darcy Ribiero; dependency theory; and, in the US, the Latin American Subaltern Studies group.² Modernity-coloniality researchers also find inspiration in thinking as different as African philosophy, South Asian subaltern studies, and Chicana feminist theory. However, as Escobar writes in a recent piece on the modernity-coloniality program, “its main driving force . . . is a continued reflection on Latin American cultural and political reality, including the subaltern knowledge of exploited and oppressed social groups” (180). In the Duke/UNC group, much of the focus of the modernity-coloniality paradigm so far has been on the problem and potential of indigeneity, thought through the prism of race and place. However, there’s a refreshing absence of codes of the romantic, noble savage in the group’s thinking of indigeneity; the Indian is read in a non-essentialized way, together with other raced and placed subjects in Latin American sites—blacks, whites, creoles, Asians, peasants, and non-human actors. Scholars of modernity-coloniality disregard notions of essence and of the centering of existence—embedded in specific ecological, sociocultural, and economic systems–and instead engage with the singularity of each situation. The ethics of encountering singular situations demands a constantly shifting epistemic framework on the part of the engaged researcher, what Walter Mignolo calls un paradigma otro.
 
The way I understand this is that modernity-coloniality should neither be configured as a theoretical master narrative (like Marxism, Foucaultianism, or Italian autonomia) that grounds the proper identity of the researcher, nor as the next higher stage in the linear history of modern thought. Rather, the modernity-coloniality framework locates its own inquiry in the historical material specificity of each situation, necessarily at the limit or border of established systems of thought. As un paradigma otro, modernity-coloniality implies the decentering of the identity of the researcher in hir engagement with a specific situation. There can be no approaching a situation from the safe confines of an established system of thought, as each case should produce a singular theoretical code, or novel “other paradigm.” What Mignolo calls “border thinking” is the stretching of an established paradigm to the breaking point as it interacts and intersects with the lively dynamism of an historico-political situation. Understood in this way, the feedback loop inherent in the modernity-coloniality framework mutually constitutes both the situation and the epistemology of the participant researcher, decentering both. Modernity-coloniality is gradually emerging as the main heir to the important Latin American contributions of dependency theory, liberation theology/philosophy, and participatory action research.
 
Astoundingly–given Michael Hardt’s connection with Latin American modernity-coloniality criticism (a heretical member, Alberto Moreiras, taught in Hardt’s Department of Literature for over a decade; Mignolo is a central person in the humanities at Duke; Escobar is Distinguished University Professor twenty minutes away at UNC, Chapel Hill; and the important Latin American subaltern journal Nepantla was housed at Duke for several years)–the phrase “modernity-coloniality” also appears in Commonwealth with no citation of Quijano, Dussel, or anyone else for that matter. Moreover, its deployment by H & N repeats the same ex/appropriation operation of COP in that they seem to mask the plagiarizing of modernity-coloniality by simply appending an extra signifier to modernity-coloniality—”race.” But before doing so, they want their readers to know they own the copyright on thinking modernity and coloniality together: “Earlier we said that without coloniality there is no modernity, and here we can see that race plays a similarly constitutive role. The three together function as a complex—modernity, coloniality, racism—with each serving as a necessary support for the others” (74). They said that without coloniality there is no modernity; not Mignolo, Dussel, Quijano, or any of the modernity-coloniality research groups. After claiming the modernity–coloniality code as their own private property, H & N don’t use the phrase in its recognizable form as connected by hyphens or dashes. However, as was the case with COP, the pretense is dropped after just a few pages; beginning on page 90 they deploy modernity-coloniality in one of the standard forms used by Latin American critics.³ The theory commons has been looted again.
 
As post-Eurocentric readers have no doubt already registered, even the recoded “modernity-coloniality-racism” is a standard extrapolation for Latin American critics, especially Walter Mignolo (The Idea of Latin America 88). It’s frustrating that theorists heretofore unwilling to grant much political agency to race (Empire unwittingly supported the “post-race” or “race blind” ideology of white liberal rule in the global North) would claim credit for introducing race into discussions of modernity’s imbrication with colonialism.⁴ However, having said that, couldn’t we step back a moment and, giving them the benefit of the doubt, concede that Latin American modernity-coloniality is sufficiently well-known in Anglophone critical theory circles that there is therefore no need to cite it? Each reader will have to answer this question for him or herself. But even if that were the case—and I, for one, don’t think modernity-coloniality has a salient presence in Euro-US theory circles—we might contrast the absence of citations and acknowledgement in the examples of Latin American critical theory with examples from European male theorists like Badiou, Zizek, and Agamben, where not only the primary sources are cited, but secondary works are acknowledged as well. It seems to me that in these cases of looting the theory commons, H & N implicitly rely on the Eurocentrism of their readers, assuming (and reproducing) ignorance of work done by Latin American subalternists, to pass off COP, coloniality, and modernity/coloniality as their own intellectual property.
 
I should add here that it’s not totally correct to claim that H & N ignore Latin America-based theorists. They draw attention to Spanish language scholars who use and cite H & N’s work: “a group of contemporary Bolivian scholars . . . use the term ‘multitude-form,’ in contrast to the old class-form, to name the internally differentiated struggles of altermodernity” (110). Praising Latin American scholars, like the Bolivian sociologist Alvaro Garcia Linera, who employ H & N’s own multitude logo—”these contemporary scholars understand it [multitude] as the protagonist of a coherent political project”—allows them to claim that their own theory of the multitude is superior for analyzing the specificity of Latin American society than, say, the insights of the most influential theorist of Latin America’s hybrid sociedad abigarrada, René Zavaleta.
 
Limiting their discussion of contemporary Latin American theorists to those who deferentially cite them and their work seems to embolden H & N to take even more from Latin American theory. Their argument that the ravages of European modernity granted a productive and positive dynamism to largely static indigenous societies in the (genocidal) Conquista seems homologous with the implicit notion that only Latin American theory that comes into contact with their own theory is worth discussing. If it doesn’t, like the examples offered above it stands a chance of being expropriated. In my opinion, this is what happens when, in a real breakthrough in their thinking in a chapter called “Biopolitical Reason,” they introduce their idea of “multiple ontologies.” Invoking Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, they write that “some contemporary anthropologists, pursuing a path parallel to ours, arrive at a similar conclusion about the role of the common in an alternative, biopolitical rationality, which goes beyond the division between nature and culture” (123). Briefly describing Viveiros de Castro’s work on the Amerindians of the Brazilian Amazon (published first in 1986, followed by an English translation in 1992), H & N write that, distinct from modern philosophy’s positing of “one nature and many cultures, here there is one culture (all are in some sense human) but many natures (occupying different worlds). Viveiros de Castro thus discovers, in contrast to the ‘multiculturalism’ of modern philosophy, an Amerindian ‘multinaturalism’” (123).
 
Although their admirably wide reading takes them into many different areas, I was struck by this invocation of an obscure Latin American anthropologist whose main fieldwork from the late 1970s and early 1980s would appear to be outside of their intellectual purview. Then a friend reminded me that the young Argentinian anthropologist Mario Blaser was at UNC on a two-year post-doc and had presented his work both at UNC, Chapel Hill (once at a modernity-coloniality group meeting) and at Duke on indigenous groups in Brazil—building explicitly on Viveiros de Castro—and their “relational ontologies.” At that time, Blaser was developing this notion into what he started calling the “multiple ontologies” of the Amerindians in the Amazon. Although Blaser had only published two pieces when he presented his work on Viveiros de Castro at Duke and UNC in 2007 and 2008, he was finishing the draft of his exciting book Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond (Duke University Press, 2010). In other words, Blaser’s work was circulating around Duke University for several years, both publicly and privately.
 
I’m pausing on this because H & N’s apparent expropriation of the concept of multiple ontologies allows them to break from the ontological unicity featured in Empire and Multitude, where humans were basically “the same” on the plane of being/becoming. In contrast, in Commonwealth, living things are construed as ontologically distinct, which helps H & N move beyond the easy critique of identity politics present in their earlier work, where identity was configured as epiphenomenal and derived from one shared ontological substance. The expropriated notion of “multiple ontologies” allows them to take more seriously political claims based on race and sexuality. Although these claims are still largely dismissed by H & N in Commonwealth, they have the potential to contribute to the commons when fixed being (gay, black, etc.) is rethought as transformative becoming. Clearly, H & N dedicated a good deal of time in the last few years to rethinking the ways in which the narrow insistence on identifying the tendency had constrained their thinking on race and sexuality, and I wholeheartedly applaud this. Their new thinking should more sufficiently acknowledge its genesis in the theory commons.
 

Appropriating the Theory Proper

 
In addition to expropriating lesser-known theory, Commonwealth privatizes the theory commons in other ways. One way is to disregard the singularity/specificity of a major theme in a European thinker’s body of work and articulate it as part of its own property. Arguably, this happens first with Alain Badiou’s theory of the event. The notions of “event” and “events” are prominent in Commonwealth whereas they are not as prevalent in Empire and Multitude. However, because Badiou has emerged as a central philosophical figure in Anglophone critical thought since the publication of Multitude in 2004, it reads as if H & N feel a fratricidal need to marginalize him and, while doing so, appropriate his most important insight. They accomplish this in a fairly surreptitious way: by concocting a Foucaultian notion of the event, with no textual support from Foucault’s oeuvre. This subsequently allows them to counter Badiou’s conservative “retrospective theory of the event” with the revolutionary “link between freedom and power that Foucault emphasizes from within the event” (60).
 
What is for me the most significant disregard for the specificity of a thinker’s work, followed by an appropriation, is the text’s treatment of Foucault himself. Foucault’s crucial notion of biopolitics qualifies as what Roland Barthes calls a “signifier without brakes,” in that it never stops at any particular signified. Although “biopolitics” was settling into some kind of consensual understanding in Anglophone critical theory around the time of Empire—the power to create, administer, and maintain (faire vivre) the life of a designated population by modern medicine and other welfare-state institutions, together with killing or leaving for dead (laisser mourir) undesirable populations within the same body politic—, the publication of Foucault’s Naissance de la Biopolitique in French in 2004 and in English in 2008 unsettled the previous understanding of it. Although one of the first invocations in English of biopower appeared in History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 in relation to the Nazi maintenance of the lives (faire vivre) of select populations of Germans while killing Jews (laisser mourir), the 2004 publication of Naissance de la Biopolitique—what appeared to be the most complete elaboration of biopolitics—complicates and opposes the earlier sense. While the Nazis are shown to epitomize the exercise of biopower in the 1975 work, in Feb. 1979 the Nazis are construed as the “field of adversity” against which the biopolitical considerations of German neo-liberals are constructed.
 
In my reading, the key to understanding this shift is to be found in the lectures Foucault gave in 1977-78, published in English in 2007 as Security, Territory, Population (Driscoll 13-16). There Foucault clearly delineates a new form of “non-disciplinary” power that appears more or less as an historical sequence following disciplinary powers’ intrusion into the very capillaries of human deportment. Opposed to the production of docile bodies and orthopedic subjects in disciplinary rule, non-disciplinary power withdraws from the social field and redirects its attention to populations. But in focusing its attention on populations, biopolitical or non-disciplinary power isn’t concerned with all subjects, only with those subjects it selects for enhancement (faire vivre). Non-disciplinary power is unconcerned about subjects not chosen for enhancement; its mode is a liberal one of laissez faire (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population 66-74) The connection with his musings on biopolitics two years previously in Society Must be Defended lies with the semantic shift from laisser mourir to laissez faire. Foucault returns to thinking about biopolitics two years after the lectures that made up Society, but now the emphasis on killing or “letting groups die off” (laisser mourir) gives way to a prescient insight that emergent neoliberal governmentality is nonchalant with respect to much of individual deportment—it is principled in its laissez faire-ing of subjects. This abandonment of many subjects (and parts of all others) by hegemonic power in the 1978-79 lectures remains to be fully thought through by Foucault scholars.
 
To approach the problem of the historical configuring of biopolitics, we would do well to recall that much of Foucault’s writing in the 1970s was designed to invert common assumptions of critical thought in Western Europe. His genealogical machine transvalued the understanding of “sexuality,” “power,” and “truth” and released them from their Frankfurt School and Sartrean confines. Why haven’t theorists considered that this is what Foucault is trying to do with his analysis of neoliberalism in Naissance de la Biopolitique? In my reading, neoliberalism isn’t construed as something more horrible than Nazism by Foucault—as some Negri followers have been arguing recently–, but is construed as a regime of biopolitical rule in which some subjects all the time and all subjects some of the time are laissez faired and liberated from the carceral confines of disciplinary power. Although leftist humanities scholars freed from the need for empirical validation frequently invoke the short 1990 essay by Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” to solve the problem of what comes after disciplinary power (one of the reasons why my social scientist friends stop listening at this point), evidence generated from Foucault’s texts points to something very different: as much as he can within the protocols of his genealogical mode, he is affirming aspects of neoliberal governmentality. And why wouldn’t he? He flaunts his anti-Marxism in several places in The Birth of Biopolitics, especially where he has the notorious free market ideologue Gary Becker speak parts of Marx’s theory of value (223-226). Since some of Foucault’s published work in volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality and the later lectures uncovers mystics, discredited philosophers like the Cynics, minor subjects, and heretical communities committed to experimenting with technologies of the self as far away as possible from hegemonic power centers, why wouldn’t Foucault guardedly affirm a form of power that is, at least in theory, not concerned with policing or disciplining marginal subjects but in laissez faire-ing them?
 
Whatever the conclusion of this brief engagement with Foucault’s texts, it is a veritable close reading when compared with the extraordinary rendition of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics by Hardt and Negri. Their refusal to engage ethically with the specificity of biopolitics allows them to simply invent an opposition in Foucault between biopower and biopolitics, as in the following passage from Multitude:
 

earlier we spoke of “biopower” to explain how the current war regime not only threatens us with death but also rules over life, producing and reproducing all aspects of society. Now we will shift from biopower to biopolitical production. . . . Biopower stands above society, transcendent, as a sovereign authority and imposes its order. Biopolitical production, in contrast, is immanent to society and creates social relationships and forms through collaborative forms of labor.

(94-95)

H & N do not justify this distinction with evidence from Foucault, who tends to use biopower and biopolitics interchangeably. What’s happening here?

 
The designation of contemporary power in Empire follows from Negri’s groundbreaking engagement with Spinoza in the late 1970s and 1980s. Beginning with the Savage Anomaly (1981) and concluding with Insurgencies (1992), Negri expands on the distinction in Spinoza between potentia (creative, revolutionary power) and potestas (dead sovereign authority). Locating this binary in Machiavelli and Hobbes as well, Negri finds a way to designate resistance in Euro-American societies that have been entirely subsumed by capital. Potentia belongs with the ontological power of the multitude, while Empire hobbles along propped up by ontic potestas. H & N’s appropriation of Foucault’s biopolitics may be read as a hipper upgrade of Negri’s old discovery: biopower=potestas while biopolitics=potentia. However, they’ve managed to appropriate as their own intellectual property arguably the most important notion in contemporary critical thought—biopolitics. This is not to deny H & N’s right to engage critically and creatively with contemporary thought, which is something they do very well. However, the engagement with Foucault regarding his notion of biopolitics seems to me to be more about consolidating the philosophical identity of Antonio Negri than it is about freeing thought to do different kinds of political work.
 

My Own Private Commonwealth

 
The kind of appropriation of Badiou and Foucault happens to others as well, but in the interest of space, I move on to the last of the three modes of privatizing the theory commons that I find in Commonwealth—excessive self-citation. One of H & N’s major themes in Commonwealth is the overcoming of identity regimes that are inextricably linked to property and that work against the commons. Blacks, queers, the poor, and indigenous people are urged to give up fixed identities as a contribution to the vertiginous utopia of becoming-common. The injunction to sacrifice fixed identity as a necessary step in reclaiming the commons should, at the very least, inspire a demonstration of some version of self-critique by the authors of Commonwealth. Have interactions with other singularities pushed H & N to identify as something radically other? How have conflictual antagonisms with other theorists impelled them to transform their thinking? Surprisingly, I haven’t been able to locate any admission of error or theoretical inadequacy in Multitude or in Commonwealth. In fact, large sections of Multitude are given over to showing how wrong the critics of Empire were, and, in some sense, how wrong the post- 9/11 geopolitical world was for not adhering to their master narrative of it in Empire. Even when their readings of important theoretical or political concepts have changed considerably in the decade spanning Empire and Commonwealth (for example, their dismissal of world systems theory in Empire has changed considerably and for the better in Commonwealth), we don’t get any sense of how this has happened—their thinking has apparently always already evolved. Over and against their call for the transformative process of all identitarian being, we get the strong sense that their being as theorists hasn’t mutated at all—fixed being dominates the flux of becoming in H & N’s own identity formation.
 
H & N’s concern for their own private intellectual property can be seen in the forty-two self-citations in the footnotes, encompassing a veritable curriculum vitae of Antonio Negri’s work over the last fifteen years. In addition to the many references to their previous work in the body of the text, the forty-two self-citations reveal a kind of panic over identity, linking several of the major points in Commonwealth not to other singularities in a theory multitude, but to themselves. The effect is to fortify their own identities as master theorists and to refuse what they insist everyone else commit to: the flux of becoming other. Apparently, Being is for them and becoming is for everyone else. I add that a book called Commonwealth should not sold by a corporate-university press but should be available (even in sections) online for free.
 
As I suggest above, one of the strengths of Commonwealth is that it pluralizes ontology, arguing through Viveiros de Castro (or, seemingly, Mario Blaser’s reading of de Castro) that being is multiple. At the level of geopolitics, H & N use Saskia Sassen to theorize the ways in which the local, the national, and the global are constantly interlocked and interchanged. Again, unconcerned with registering how their own thinking has changed on this topic, they posit in different contexts the multiplicity of substance, whether it be natural, political or techno-material. Yet in Commonwealth they refuse to apply this multiplicity of substance to the real of globality. Their insistence on plurality could logically lead them to consider something like the trinity of common/public/private as a similar kind of interlocked substance, where subjectivity would have to be thought as mutually determined by the three social realms. The possibility for political change would have to come at an interstitial limit somewhere within these three realms, as Ernesto Laclau has argued in a somewhat different context. Thought in this way, there would necessarily be more public thinking and acting not determined exclusively by the tendentialized commons. Although I personally like the many interesting claims they make about the commons—and it needs to be stated clearly that they have moved critical thinking forward in terms of the philosophy of the commons—they conclude by restricting their analysis to this realm alone. As someone who works at an increasingly downsized public university, I would say the political struggle right now for leftist professoriat should focus on expanding the shrinking public in the face of local, national, and global attacks on it.⁵ Leaping over the realm of the public into some utopian commons seems like dangerous romanticism from this perspective. Moreover, new activist groups like UK Uncut and US Uncut have had some success in arguing for the centrality of the public over and against the attack on it by privatizing agendas of free market politicians. Some of their success should be attributed to refusing the utopianism of an idealized notion of the common.
 
To conclude, I’m willing to admit that my sensitivity to the problems in Commonwealth is a sign that this dude is still abiding in the Republic of Property. Yes, I’ve invested in the realm of the private as well as in political commitments to the public and philosophical commitments to the commons. Before I give up my private pleasures and my duties to the public, and give myself over to the de-territorializing flux of becoming-common, I want some honest accounting of the distinct contents of each of the three realms. I hope it is fair to ask the relatively privileged CEOs of contemporary cultural theory like Hardt and Negri to be more reflexive about the pleasures and dangers of all three realms. If they continue to refuse to respect alterity and singularity in the theory commons, I for one am unwilling to link with them in any multitude, even at the level of a theory multitude. At least in the realm of the public, there is still a price to be paid for looting.
 

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].
 

(1333)

One should not be too much surprised. For the reasons just explained, the classical or modern view of chance, as ultimately grounded in causality, has been part of the dominant scientific and philosophical ideology and has had the backing of a great many major figures in science, from physics to evolutionary theory. Einstein led the way in his criticism of quantum theory. Although he admitted that quantum epistemology is “logically possible” and is consistent with the experimental data, he saw it as “so very contrary to [his] scientific instinct that [he could not] forgo the search for a more complete conception [of nature]” (“Physics and Reality” 377). Einstein’s hope has not materialized thus far in quantum theory.

 
The situation is, however, peculiar. On the one hand, quantum mechanics and several other scientific theories that, at the very least, allow for postmodern interpretations of them are among the most effective theories we have. On the other hand, their postmodern aspects compel many to look for classical-like alternatives to these theories. Such alternatives cannot be excluded, given that our fundamental physical theories, as they stand now, are incomplete. At present, however, there are no signs that such alternatives are any more likely than postmodern-like or even yet more radical theories. According to Anton Zeilinger et al., one of the most prominent quantum information physicists in the world, and his co-authors: “We suggest that these [alternatives] are simply attempts to keep, in one way or other, a realistic view of the world. It may well be that in the future, quantum physics will be superseded by a new theory, but it is likely that this will be much more radical than anything we have today” (237).
 
The argument of Zeilinger et al. is unlikely to convince most proponents of classically-oriented thinking about quantum theory, or nature and science in general, any more than a more general argument for postmodern thought offered here is likely to do. Both types of argumentation, that concerning postmodern-like science and that concerning postmodern thought in general, are resisted and even attacked jointly, as in the so-called Science Wars of late 1990s, centered on postmodern French philosophy and constructivist studies of science, and more recently in the debate concerning religion and science, on which I would like to comment in closing. I leave aside arguments that try to bring science and religion together, since, whatever their chances elsewhere, such attempts are not of much interest if one adopts the epistemology of postmodern thought, as defined here, since the latter is, by definition, incompatible with any theology, positive or negative.⁷
 
Of more interest here are those arguments that oppose religion and science or even counter religion by science on epistemologically classical, rather than epistemologically postmodern, grounds. Such arguments are offered, for example, by Richard Dawkins in God’s Delusion and The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, and by Stephen Hawking, in The Grand Design (co-written with Leonard Mlodinow). These are suspiciously grandiose titles, with a peculiarly theological ring to them. Dawkins is also known, since the Science Wars, for his discontent with postmodernism, of which he knows little and is willing to understand still less, but which he nevertheless does not hesitate to claim to be a threat to culture and progress (e.g., in “Postmodernism Disrobed”). His view is understandable given that postmodernist thought is in conflict with his own, uncritically Enlightenment, thinking. Dawkins is woefully inattentive to the possibility that postmodernist arguments, attacked by him and by other scientists, show difficulties in maintaining this type of thinking even in science itself. What makes Dawkins’s arguments of particular interest in the present context is the metaphysical grounding of these arguments, specifically the fact that, at bottom, they share the same metaphysical or, in Heidegger’s and Derrida’s terms, ontotheological base with the theologically oriented theories that they attack, such as the argument for “intelligent design” in evolution.
 
The term “ontotheology” was introduced by Martin Heidegger and then used by Derrida, who gave it a more radical sense (in part against Heidegger’s own grain), along with its more famous Derridean avatars, such as logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence (e.g., Margins of Philosophy 6). For present purposes, ontotheological thinking may be understood as a way of classical or modern thinking that, while not necessarily theological, is (often without realizing it) ontologically modeled on theology, and that in particular has a single all-governing metaphysical base, analogous to that provided by the idea of God in theological thinking. Thus, the concept of intelligent design in biology is theological rather than only ontotheological and is, thus, different from Darwin’s and post-Darwinian conceptions of evolution, which are, generally, not theological. On the other hand, such conceptions may be thought ontotheologically. For example, one thinks ontotheologically if one conceives of evolution as a material but at bottom causal process, for example, as fully governed (“overdetermined”) by a single structure, such as a determinate adaptive mechanism or set of mechanisms, which also establish the causality of evolutionary process. I am not saying that adaptive mechanisms (plural!) are not important to evolution: they manifestly are. But I am saying that, in addition to a likely uncontainable multiplicity of these mechanics, random, a-causal forces of internal (random genetic mutations) and external (environmental) nature may and probably do play an equally important role in the dynamics of evolution. Darwin appears to have at least thought that such may be the case. The corresponding evolutionary framework would, then, not be ontotheological in the present sense.⁸
 
To give another example, Marxist or post-Marxist theories, even those with a postmodernist flavor, as in the case of Jameson, offer a materialist view of human history and, hence, are not theological. They are, however, usually ontotheological, insofar as they conceive of human history as a teleological process governed by the class structure defined by the relationships between capital and labor. They also deploy a form of the Enlightenment-like grand narrative, as, for example, in Jameson, in conjunction with the narrative of postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” which logic, one presumes, includes postmodern “incredulity” towards grand narratives, incredulity that grounds Lyotard’s very different argument concerning postmodernism.⁹
 
Now, even though the anxieties concerning postmodern-like thinking in science are considerable in the scientific community, that certain scientific theories may be or even may need to be interpreted along postmodern-like lines is at least allowed as a possibility, albeit an unwelcome possibility. When it comes to culture, postmodern thought is met with unmitigated resistance or is rejected outright by most scientists comment on the subject. One reason for this difference is the assumption that, while we have power to shape society and culture, nature and its laws are independent, albeit open to human understanding. As should be apparent from the preceding discussion, both (or all three) assumptions are questionable, especially from the postmodern perspective, in which these assumptions more often than not appear to be part of or to arise from the ontotheological ideologies in question at the moment. Indeed, as will be seen presently, in accordance with one such ideology, nature too may be seen as something to be shaped or “designed,” at least at some levels, by an ontotheologically-based human intervention.
 
Theology, then, is unequivocally rejected as a way of understanding how nature works or, given the materialist views of the authors under discussion, and the role of theology in our thinking and the rise of its significance in recent decades is lamented accordingly. At the same time, ontotheology is embraced in understanding nature and, again, especially culture, without reflecting either on its common metaphysical base with theology or on problems of the Enlightenment-like ideologies that arise from their ontological character. Hence we also have the continuing dominance of the grand narrative of scientific progress, essentially the grand narrative of the Enlightenment, which was at stake in Lyotard’s critique of modernity and which, so Lyotard hoped, would be subject to postmodern incredulity. Against Lyotard’s expectations, while science and technology open to postmodern-like thought and knowledge have continued to flourish since 1980, the postmodern incredulity toward modern thought and knowledge, or their grand narratives, has actually diminished. On the other hand, a new power of competing ontotheological and, often, theological grand narratives has become prominent during the last three decades.
 
This last circumstance should give pause to believers in the grand narrative of scientific progress, and make them pay more attention to postmodernist arguments concerning grand narratives and the type of Enlightenment vision of science, history, and culture these scientists adopt. It does not appear, however, that it does. Instead, the situation is, yet again, seen and handled by both sides (apart from a small minority of those who hold postmodernist views of the type advocated here) as a conflict, even a war, of competing ontotheological ideologies and grand narratives. Not surprisingly, divergent phenomena within a given side of these confrontations are often uncritically lumped together by other sides: one speaks of religion (or a given large religious denomination) in general or, conversely, of science in general, and so forth, including, importantly, postmodernism in general. My use of the word “believer” notwithstanding, I am not suggesting, as some have, that the views of believers in the grand narrative of science necessarily amount to a secular religion of its own, although this does happens sometimes. Theological and materialist ontotheologies are not the same. They are only analogously grounded metaphysically, and it is this grounding and its implications that are at stake here. Commenting on the prominent and even dominant ideology of nanotechnology, Jean-Pierre Dupuy made the following perceptive observation:
 

An expression in the form an oxymoron sums up all this [ideology] up very well: nature has become artificial nature.
 
The next stage obviously consists in asking whether the mind could not take over from nature in order to carry out its creative task more intelligently and efficiently. Damien Broderick asks: “Is it likely than nanosystems, designed by human minds, will bypass this Darwinian wandering, and leap straight to design success?” (The Spike 118). In a comparative cultural studies perspective, it is fascinating to see American science, which has to carry on an epic struggle to root out of public education every trace of creationism, including its most recent avatar, intelligent design, return to the design paradigm through the intermediary of the nanotechnology program, the only difference being that man now assumes the role of the demiurge.
 

(158)

While the difference in question deserves more emphasis than Dupuy’s “only” suggests, the appeal, ontotheological in character, of nanotechnological or other biotechnological design paradigms and their shared basis with the intelligent-design theory are indeed striking.

 
It is important to keep in mind that the paradigm of design originates in cybernetics and in subsequent developments in computer science and information theory. These developments of course contributed to and were even largely responsible technologically for “the postmodern condition(s)” that led to the rise of postmodern thought, knowledge, and culture. They also played an important role in the development of postmodern thinking and thought by helping to dislocate the classical and then modern concept of subjectivity, defined in part by bracketing, from the opposite sides, both concepts, the “animal” and the “machine,” from their conceptions of the human. At the same time, however, some of these developments have exhibited strong ontotheological and intelligent-design-like tendencies, similar to those found in nanotechnology, as Dupuy indicates (155-56). For example, artificial-intelligence (AI) programs, especially the so-called strong AI, assume, roughly, that human or human-like intelligence and consciousness can be enacted by a digital computer. This kind of double and even schizophrenic situation and attitude—the postmodern decentering of subjectivity or post-subjectivity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ontotheology of the post-human “intelligent design”—also defines certain recent (“post-humanist”) trends in the humanities.
 
Appeals to the concept of design are also found in ontotheological programs for fundamental physics or for evolutionary biology, as can be seen in Hawking and Mlodinow’s book, The Grand Design. In fundamental physics, mathematics often functions as the ontotheology of the Universe, as the Mario Livio’s recent book, Is God a Mathematician? (whose argument is ontotheological rather than theological, and God is invoked metaphorically, as did Einstein). Conversely, and sometimes reciprocally, although less common, the theological association between divine thinking and mathematics is far from absent. This association also has a much longer history, which, as indicated earlier, extends from Plato and even the pre-Socratics. But then, emerging at least with Democritus, materialist ontotheology has a long history, too.
 
My main question here is whether certain aspirations for a more just society may be effectively served by these ontotheologically grounded arguments, even if these arguments are advanced against theology. In other words, are aspirations for social justice effectively served if one sees the world in terms of competing ideologies and grand narratives, those of the scientific Enlightenment or those governed by one or another form of theology, or if social justice is better served by more postmodern ways of thinking about the nature and practice of politics and justice? I am willing to grant such aspirations to the scientific authors under discussion, or in other critiques of postmodernism, such as Habermas’s–whom Lyotard, too, credits with wanting a more just society, but not with a good argument concerning how to achieve it (The Postmodern Condition 66-67). First, when it comes to a better, more just society, is ontotheology, such as that of the scientific Enlightenment, better than theology? I think it is likely to be. In fairness, theology has made its contributions to the advancement of knowledge and justice, while science and the ideology of scientific progress have sometimes been used, often in the name of justice, without much regard for actual justice and for purposes that are hardly just, by almost any concept or criterion of justice. Secondly, however, and most crucially here, is Enlightenment ontotheology better for social justice than is postmodernism? While I do not say that it cannot be better, it probably is not.
 
Consider the case Lyotard makes concerning justice, a case that ultimately drives the argument of The Postmodern Condition, which also proceeds, at least in part, from physics to justice, that is, from the postmodern epistemology of physics, and specifically from atomic or quantum physics, to the postmodern epistemology of justice (55-58).¹⁰ First, Lyotard argues that while Habermas’s cause, justice, is good, his conceptions of consensus and of the unity of knowledge and culture, a unity that underlies the idea of consensus, are “outmoded and suspect values.” They are unlikely to survive “that severe reexamination that postmodernity imposes on the thought of the Enlightenment, on the idea of a unitary end of history and a subject.” “But,” Lyotard says, “justice as a value is neither outmoded nor suspect. We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus” (The Postmodern Condition 66). (This link would also make the idea of justice ontotheological, even if this ontotheology is a materialist one.) Lyotard then offers a brief manifesto-like outline of postmodern politics that would respect both “the desire for justice” and “the desire for the unknown” (67), and I would add the desire for and in any event the acceptance of the irreducibly unthinkable, which view may be more radical than that of Lyotard. It might be closer to that of Emmanuel Levinas, except that Levinas’s ethics of the unthinkable or, in his terms, the infinite is, as Derrida argues, ultimately ontotheological.¹¹ It also follows from the preceding discussion that this desire is the desire for the irreducibly multiple and for irreducible chance—akin to amor fati, invoked by Friedrich Nietzsche, a love of fate, but a “fate” defined by uncertainty without underlying necessity, a love for the uncertainty of the future (On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo 258).
 
Is this type of justice possible? At least, it appears no more impossible and may even prove to be more likely to work in practice than the idea of justice based on the idea of consensus or other ontotheological (or theological) principles, which have at best a questionable record of leading to just societies. But, perhaps against Lyotard, who appears to have been more optimistic on this point, under postmodern conditions the possibility of justice entails an irreducible possibility of injustice. I am not suggesting that we cannot or should not try to minimize the chance and probability for injustice in our efforts to achieve a better justice, a justice-to-come (a-venir), to borrow from Derrida’s “democracy to-come” in Specters of Marx. My point instead is that we cannot eliminate this chance for injustice, even ideally, if we want our ideal to relate meaningfully to the actual world. Nor can this justice be justice for all: one justice for all or the same justice forever. It cannot be the justice, the justice of the One, even if it is the multiple-One, the multiple of justice underlined by a hidden single justice, theological or otherwise ontotheological. One justice for all is an ontotheological fiction, with which, defined as a monotheistic theological justice, Socrates, arguably the first modern thinker, wanted to replace the Dionysian vision of the world offered by Greek tragedy, according to Nietzsche, the first postmodern thinker or, as he saw himself, the first Dionysian philosopher. This is a great name from the past for his philosophy of the future, as he liked to call it, or for any true philosophy.
 
In this view and this way of justice, which can only be a view and a way, since, as Nietzsche also tells us, the view or the way does not exist, there has never been any other justice than the irreducibly uncertain and inconstant, multiple justice (Thus Spoke Zarathustra 156). There can be only a possible or at most a probable justice. No court of law and no other form of dispensing justice gives us more than a chance of justice; in all our ethical acts, acts aimed at justice, we make our bets, however certain we might believe ourselves to be in what is just. More often than not it is no more than a blind chance, and, in the present view of chance, there is no ultimate causal architecture underlying this chance. Our knowledge and thought may help us, but they can only help us make more likely bets, and then only sometimes. Justice is blind because, if I can put it this way, it is blind even more toward what is just than toward what may divert us from being just, as the iconic image of the blind goddess balancing the scales is designed to tell us. We cannot count, but can only bet, on what will be defined as just in the future, even a very near future. Not only are people inconstant, but justice itself is inconstant, because it is never itself, never in itself, never apart from people who, however, cannot be completely in control of justice, either. Justice is never divine, but it is never completely human either.
 
This view of justice also returns us to the tragic thought of ancient Greece, in particular to Aeschylus, whom Nietzsche, a fellow Heraclitean and a fellow Dionysian, singles out, in The Birth of Tragedy, as the greatest tragic poet, and from whom Socrates, a dreamer of permanent, divine justice, refused to learn. In Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus gives us, as a gift, a profound sense of a Heraclitean river of justice, into which we can never step twice or perhaps even once: “What a City [polis] approves as just [dikae] changes with changing times” (l.1048). This is not a comforting picture of justice, though it fits the tragic scene of Thebes. But there may be no scene of justice that is much different. It is true that Aeschylus’s, or rather (this difference should not be overlooked) the chorus’s, contention as such does not mean that there is no other, more permanent, justice, human or divine, that a city (polis) does not perceive or does not want to, or cannot, maintain, for example, by surrendering the demands of this justice to political interests. But the statement poses a question, reverberating throughout pre-Socratic thought, a question to which Socrates and Nietzsche give two very different answers, or, since one can hardly hope for answers here, which they ask differently. The first is optimistic, reflecting the optimism of Socratic logic, modeled on geometry, and the second is tragic, reflecting the vision of tragic art, such as that of Aeschylus, against which Socratism waged a war. While a more optimistic, more Socratic view of justice, at least future justice, is also possible under postmodern conditions, postmodern thought, as understood here, appears to direct us towards a more Nietzschean, tragic vision of justice. This vision is not negative, nihilistic, or pessimistic; tragedy is not the same as pessimism (Nietzsche is not Schopenhauer). Nor is this vision nostalgic for a lost belief, no longer possible, in some more assured, universal justice.
 
Instead this vision arises from an affirmation of life, which is rarely just, even in the face of tragedy, which is inescapable.
 

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.
 

 

 

Click for larger view

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.