From Postmodernism to Postmodernity:

the Local/Global Context*

by Ihab Hassan
What Was Postmodernism?
What was postmodernism, and what is it
still? I believe it is a revenant, the return
of the irrepressible; every time we are
rid of it, its ghost rises back. And like a
ghost, it eludes definition. Certainly, I
know less about postmodernism today
than I did thirty years ago, when I began
to write about it. This may be because
postmodernism has changed, I have
changed, the world has changed.
But this is only to confirm Nietzsches
insight, that if an idea has a history, it is
already an interpretation, subject to
future revision. What escapes

interpretation and reinterpretation is a

Platonic Idea or an abstract analytical
concept, like a circle or a triangle.
Romanticism, modernism,
postmodernism, however, like humanism
or realism, will shift and slide
continually with time, particularly in an
age of ideological conflict and media
hype.
All this has not prevented
postmodernism from haunting the
discourse of architecture, the arts, the
humanities, the social and sometimes
even the physical sciences; haunting not
only academic but also public speech in
business, politics, the media, and
entertainment industries; haunting the

language of private life styles like

postmodern cuisinejust add a dash of
raspberry vinegar. Yet no consensus
obtains on what postmodernism really
means.
The term, let alone the concept, may
thus belong to what philosophers call an
essentially contested category. That is, in
plainer language, if you put in a room the
main discussants of the conceptsay
Leslie Fiedler, Charles Jencks, JeanFranois Lyotard, Bernard Smith,
Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson,
Marjorie Perloff, Linda Hutcheon, and,
just to add to the confusion, myself
locked the room and threw away the key,
no consensus would emerge between the

discussants after a week, but a thin

trickle of blood might appear beneath the
sill.
Let us not despair: though we may be
unable to define or exorcise the ghost of
postmodernism, we can approach it,
surprising it from various angles,
perhaps teasing it into a partial light. In
the process, we may discover a family
of words congenial to postmodernism.
Here are some current uses of the term:
1.Frank Gehrys Guggenheim Museum in
Bilbao (Spain), Ashton Raggatt
McDougalls Storey Hall in Melbourne
(Australia), and Arata Isozakis Tsukuba
Center (Japan) are considered examples

of postmodern architecture: they depart

from the pure angular geometries of the
Bauhaus, the minimal steel and glass
boxes of Mies van der Rohe, mixing
aesthetic and historical elements, flirting
with fragments, fantasy, and even kitsch.
2.In a recent encyclical, titled Fides et
Ratio, Pope John Paul II actually used
the word postmodernism to condemn
extreme relativism in values and beliefs,
acute irony and skepticism toward
reason, and the denial of any possibility
of truth, human or divine.
3.In cultural studies, a highly politicized
field, the term postmodernism is often
used in opposition to postcolonialism,

the former deemed historically feckless,

being unpolitical or, worse, not
politically correct.
4.In Pop culture, postmodernismor
PoMo as Yuppies call it insouciantly
refers to a wide range of phenomena,
from Andy Warhol to Madonna, from the
colossal plaster Mona Lisa I saw
advertising a pachinko parlor in Tokyo
to the giant, cardboard figure of
Michelangelos Davidpink dayglo
classes, canary shorts, a camera slung
across bare, brawny shoulders
advertising KonTiki Travels in New
Zealand.
What do all these have in common?

Well, fragments, hybridity, relativism,

play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, antiideological stance, an ethos bordering
on kitsch and camp. So, we have begun
to build a family of words applying to
postmodernism; we have begun to create
a context, if not a definition, for it. More
impatient or ambitious readers can
consult Hans Bertens The Idea of the
Postmodern, the best and fairest
introduction I know to the topic.
But now I must make my second move
or feint to approach postmodernism from
a different perspective.
Postmodernism/Postmodernity
I do so by making a distinction I did not

sufficiently stress in my earlier work:

between postmodernism and
postmodernity. This is the distinction
that constitutes the main thrust of this
statement, and to which I will later
return.
For the moment, let me simply say that I
mean postmodernism to refer to the
cultural sphere, especially literature,
philosophy, and the various arts,
including architecture, while
postmodernity refers to the geopolitical
scheme, less order than disorder, which
has emerged in the last decades. The
latter, sometimes called postcolonialism,
features globalization and localization,
conjoined in erratic, often lethal, ways.

This distinction is not the defunct

Marxist difference between
superstructure and base, since the new
economic, political, religious, and
technological forces of the world hardly
conform to Marxist laws. Nor does
postmodernity equal postcolonialism,
though the latter, with its concern for
colonial legacies, may be part of the
former.
Think of postmodernity as a world
process, by no means identical
everywhere yet global nonetheless. Or
think of it as a vast umbrella under
which stand various phenomena:
postmodernism in the arts,
poststructuralism in philosophy,

feminism in social discourse,

postcolonial and cultural studies in
academe, but also multi-national
capitalism, cybertechnologies,
international terrorism, assorted
separatist, ethnic, nationalist, and
religious movementsall standing
under, but not causally subsumed by,
postmodernity.
From what I have said, we can infer
two points: first, that postmodernism
(the cultural phenomenon) applies to
affluent, high-tech, consumer, mediadriven societies; and second, that
postmodernity (the inclusive
geopolitical process) refers to an
interactive, planetary phenomenon

wherein tribalism and imperialism, myth

and technology, margins and centers
these terms are not parallelplay out
their conflictual energies, often on the
Internet.
I have said that I did not stress enough
the distinction between postmodernism
and postmodernity in my earlier work.
But in fairness to the subjectand
perhaps to myselfI should note that an
internal distinction I made within
postmodernism itself points to a crucial
characteristic of postmodernity in its
planetary context.
In an essay titled Culture,
Indeterminacy, and Immanence: Margins

of the (Postmodern) Age (1977), I

coined the term indetermanencethat
is, indeterminacy combined with
immanenceto describe two disparate
tendencies within postmodernism: that of
cultural indeterminacy, on the one hand,
and that of technological immanence, on
the other. These tendencies are
contrastive rather than dialectical: they
ensue in no Hegelian or Marxist
synthesis. (I can think of no one less
postmodern than either.)
By indeterminacy, or better still,
indeterminacies, I mean a combination
of trends that include openness,
fragmentation, ambiguity, discontinuity,
decenterment, heterodoxy, pluralism,

deformation, all conducive to

indeterminacy or under-determination.
The latter concept alone, deformation,
subsumes a dozen current terms like
deconstruction, decreation,
disintegration, displacement, difference,
discontinuity, disjunction,
disappearance, de-definition,
demystification, detotalization,
delegitimation, decolonization. Through
all these concepts moves a vast will to
undoing, affecting the body politic, the
body cognitive, the erotic body, the
individual psyche, the entire realm of
discourse in the West. In literature alone,
our ideas of author, audience, reading,
writing, book, genre, critical theory, and
of literature itself, have all suddenly

become questionable questionable but

far from invalid, reconstituting
themselves in various ways.
These uncertainties or indeterminacies,
however, are also dispersed or
disseminated by the fluent imperium of
technology. Thus I call the second major
tendency of postmodernism immanences,
a term that I employ without religious
echo to designate the capacity of mind to
generalize itself in symbols, intervene
more and more into nature, act through
its own abstractions, and project human
consciousness to the edges of the
cosmos. This mental tendency may be
further described by words like
diffusion, dissemination, projection,

interplay, communication, which all

derive from the emergence of human
beings as language animals, homo pictor
or homo significans, creatures
constituting themselves, and also their
universe, by symbols of their own
making. Call it gnostic textualism, if you
must. Meanwhile, the public world
dissolves as fact and fiction blend,
history becomes a media happening,
science takes its own models as the only
accessible reality, cybernetics confronts
us with the enigma of artificial
intelligence (Deep Blue contra
Kasparov), and technologies project our
perceptions to the edge of matter, within
the atom or at the rim of the expanding
universe.

No doubt, these tendencies, I repeat,

may seem less prevalent in some
countries than others like America or
Australia, Germany or Japan, where the
term postmodernism has become
familiar both in and outside the
university. But the fact in most
developed societies remains: as a
cultural phenomenon, postmodernism
evinces the double tendency I have
dubbed indetermanenceits forms
cognate to labyrinths, networks, the
rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari.
The earth, however, is larger and more
significant than Planet Hollywood,
Deutsche Bank, or Mitsubishi. Hence the
relevance of Postmodernity. For the

indetermanences of cultural
postmodernism seem to have mutated
into the local-global conflicts of
postmodernity, including the genocides
of Bosnia, Kosovo, Ulster, Rwanda,
Chechnya, Kurdistan, Sudan, Sri Lanka,
Tibet. At the same time, cultural
postmodernism itself has metastasized
into sterile, campy, kitschy, jokey, deadend games or sheer media stunts.
Here, then, are some new terms to add
to our family of words about
postmodernism: indeterminacy,
immanence, textualism, networks, hightech, consumer, media-driven societies,
and all the sub-vocabularies they imply.
Have we nudged the ghost of

postmodernism toward the light?

Perhaps we need to nudge it further by
raising a different question: isnt the
statement of this essay, so far, a mark of
historical introspection? Doesnt it
suggest that the postmodern mind
inclines to self-apprehension, selfreflection, as if intent on writing the
equivocal autobiography of an age?
The Equivocal Autobiography of an Age
In 1784, Immanuel Kant published an
essay called Was Ist Aufklrung?
(What is Enlightenment?). Some
thinkers, especially Michel Foucault,
have taken this essay to be the first time
a philosopher asks self-reflexively: who

are we, historically speaking, and what

is the meaning of our contemporaneity?
Certainly, many of us wonder nowadays:
Was ist Postmodernismus? But as
Foucault fails to notehe fails in other
respects toowe ask the question
without Kants confidence in the
possibilities of knowledge, his historical
self-assurance.
Children of an equivocal Chronos,
versed in aporia, suspicion, incredulity,
votaries of decenterment and apostles of
multiplicity, pluralist, parodic,
pragmatic, and polychronic, we could
hardly privilege postmodernism as Kant
privileged the Enlightenment. Instead,
we betray an abandon of belatedness, a

seemingly limitless anxiety of selfnomination. Hence the weird terms and

nomenclatures surrounding
postmodernism, terms like classical
postmodernism, high, pop, po-mo,
revisionary, deconstructive,
reconstructive, insurrectional, pre-, and
post-postmodernismneologisms
suggesting an explosion in a word
factory.
In any case, we can hardly imagine any
other epoch agonizing so much about
itself, only to devise so clunky a
moniker, so awkward a name as
postmodernism. (In this, I share the
blame.) Perhaps, after all,
postmodernism can be defined as a

continuous inquiry into self-definition.

This impulse is by no means restricted to
the so-called West. The more interactive
the globe, the more populations move,
jostle, and grapplethis is the age of
diasporasthe more questions of
cultural, religious, and personal identity
become acuteand sometimes specious.
In still another transposition of
postmodernism into postmodernity, you
can hear the cry around the world: who
are we? who am I?
So, once again, here are some more
words accruing to our family of words
about postmodernism: historical and
epistemic self-reflexivity, anxiety of
self-nomination, a polychronic sense of

time (linear, cyclical, sidereal,

cybernetic, nostalgic, eschatological,
visionary times are all in there), massive
migrations, forced or free, a crisis of
cultural and personal identities.

Brief History of the Term

This attempt at self-apprehension
what I called the equivocal
autobiography of an ageappears
reflected in the erratic history of the
word postmodernism itself, a history,
nonetheless, that helps to clarify the
concept currently in use. I must be
ruthlessly selective here, particularly
since Charles Jencks and Margaret Rose
have given detailed accounts of that
history elsewhere.
It seems that an English salon painter,
John Watkins Chapman, used the term,
back in the 1870s, in the sense that we
now speak of Post-Impressionism. Jump

to 1934, when Federico de Ons uses the

word postmodernismo to suggest a
reaction against the difficulty and
experimentalism of modernist poetry. In
1939, Arnold Toynbee takes up the term
in a very different sense, proclaiming the
end of the modern, Western bourgeois
order dating back to the seventeenth
century. Then, in 1945, Bernard Smith
employs the word to suggest a movement
in painting, beyond abstraction, which
we call Socialist Realism. In the fifties
in America, Charles Olson, in
conjunction with poets and artists at
Black Mountain College, speaks of a
postmodernism that reverts more to Ezra
Pound and William Carlos Williams than
to formalist poets like T. S. Eliot. By the

end of that decade, in 1959 and 1960,

Irving Howe and Harry Levin,
respectively, argue that postmodernism
intimates a decline in high modernist
culture.
Only in the late sixties and early
seventies, in various essays by Leslie
Fiedler and myself, among others, does
postmodernism begin to signify a
distinct, sometimes positive,
development in American culture, a
critical modification, if not actual end,
of modernism. It is in this latter sense, I
believe, changing masks and changing
faces, that postmodern theory persists
today.

Why do I make such a seemingly selfserving claim? Consider the sixties for a
moment, all the openings and breaks that
occurred in developed, consumer
societies (we are speaking of
postmodernism). Andreas Huyssen
called that decade, straddling the sixties
and seventies really, the great divide.
Within ten or fifteen years, the United
States experienced an astonishing
succession of liberation and countercultural movements: the Berkeley Free
Speech, Vietnam Anti-War, Black
Power, Chicano Power, Womens Lib,
Gay Pride, Gray Panther, Psychedelic,
and Ecological Movements, to mention
but a few. Street theatre, happenings,
rock music, aleatory composition,

concrete poetry, the

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, pop art,
and multi-media events spread, blurring
the borders of high and popular culture,
art and theory, text and metatext and
paratext (my Paracriticism, for instance).
Hippies and Yippies, Flower Children
and Minute Men, Encounter Groups and
Zen Monks crowded the landscape.
Elitism and hierarchy were out,
participation and anarchy, or at least
pseudo-anarchy, were in. The forms of
thought and art shifted from static to
performative, from the hypotactical to
paratacticalor so it seemed. Not
Heidegger but Derrida; not Matisse but
Duchamp; not Schnberg but Cage; not
Hemingway but Barthelmeand again,

most visibly, not Gropius, Mies, or Le

Corbusier, but Gehry, Renzo Piano, and
Isozaki in architecture, among countless
others. (Note, however, that
postmodernism in the various arts is not
necessarily homologous, as I will later
discuss.)
In this climate of cultural
indetermanence and social
delegitimation (this latter, Lyotards
term), postmodernism grew, assuming its
latest guise. Grew and I think died,
though its specter still haunts Europe,
America, Australia Japan. But that
specter may now find a new life and a
new name. Clicking Postmodernism in
a search engine, my cybermaven

colleague Cam Tatham assures me,

yields 92,000 links in .06 seconds.

Conceptual Difficulties
The specter still haunts, but it does so
ineffectually; for it is conceptually
flawed, and times wingless chariot
awaits no one. Since the theoretical
difficulties of postmodernism are
themselves revealing, I will mention at
least five:
1.The term postmodernism is not only
awkward; it is also Oedipal, and like a
rebellious but impotent adolescent, it
can not separate itself completely from
its parent. It can not invent for itself a
new name like Baroque, Rococo,
Romantic, Symbolist, Futurist, Cubist,
Dadaist, Surrealist, Constructivist,

Vorticist, and so on. In short, the relation

of postmodernism to modernism remains
ambiguous, Oedipal or parasitical if you
wish; or as Bernard Smith remarks in
Modernisms History, it remains a
conflictual dialogue with the older
movement, which he would rather call
Formalesquea term with problems
of its own.
2.Postmodernism, misnamed, Smith
would insist, relates itself to a
modernism no longer modern; for the
latter can no longer describe the high
cultural achievement of the years, say,
between 1890 and 1940. That is because
the term modern, in its typological sense,
keeps moving forward at the cutting edge

of history, and has done so from the

Abbot Suger and Shakespeare, who both
used the word, to our time.
3.The term postmodernism, triply
inadequate, seems very un-postmodern
because postmodern, specifically
poststructuralist, thought rejects linear
time, from past to present to future as the
prefixes pre-and post-imply. Postmodern
time, I have said, is polychronic. As
such, it avoids categorical and linear
periodization: for instance, in English
literary history, that useful and familiar
sequence of Elizabethan, Jacobean,
Neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian,
Edwardian, Modern, Postmodern.

4.More importantly, postmodernism can

not serve simply as a period, as a
temporal, chronological, or diachronic
construct; it must also function as a
theoretical, phenomenological, or
synchronic category. Older or dead
writers, like Samuel Beckett or Jorge
Luis Borges or Raymond Roussel or
Vladimir Nabokov, can be postmodern,
while younger ones, still alive like John
Updike or Toni Morrison or V. S.
Naipaul, may not be postmodern (the
distinction carries no literary value
judgments). And so, we can not claim
that everything before 1960 is modern,
everything after, postmodern. Becketts
Murphy appeared in 1938, Joyces
Finnegans Wake in 1939, both, in my

view, preeminently postmodern. Nor can

we simply say that Joyce is modern or
postmodern. Which Joyce? That of
Dubliners (pre-modern), Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (modern),
Ulysses (modern shading into
postmodern), Finnegans Wake
(postmodern)?
All this is to say that a persuasive model
of postmodernism requires a
constellation of particular styles,
features, attitudes, placed in a particular
historical context. Anyone of these
features alonesay parody, selfreflection, or black humormay find
antecedents a hundred or a thousand
years ago, in Euripides or Sterne. But

together, in their present historical

context, these features may cohere into a
working model of the phenomenon
called postmodernism.
5.Having constructed such a model, does
postmodernism develop along the same
lines in every artistic or cultural field?
Does it manifest itself identically in
architecture, painting, music, dance,
literatureand in the latter alone, in
poetry, fiction, drama, the essay? What
are the correspondences and symmetries,
but also disjunctions and asymmetries, in
various artistic genres, indeed in distinct
fields like science, philosophy, politics,
popular entertainment? Obviously, the
challenges to a comprehensive model of

postmodernism are daunting. Do we

need such a model? Do we still need the
word?

Postmodernism as Interpretive Category

At this point, we might as well ask
whether in Cairo, Sydney, Milwaukee,
or Kuala Lumpurwhy bother with
postmodernism at all?
One answer, I have suggested, is that
postmodernism mutates into
postmodernity, which is our global/local
condition. I will shortly return, and
indeed conclude, with this theme. But
there is another, more immediate
answer: postmodernism has become,
consciously or unconsciously, for better
or for worse, an interpretive category, a
hermeneutic tool. As such, it impinges
on our business as students of culture,

literature, the arts.

Why is that? More than a period, more
even than a constellation of artistic
trends and styles, postmodernism has
become, even after its partial demise, a
way we view the world. Bernard Smith
may be right in saying that
postmodernism amounts to little more
than a struggle with the modernist
Formalesque. But this dialogue or
struggle also becomes a filter through
which we view history, interpret reality,
see ourselves; postmodernism is now
our shadow.
Every generation, of course, reinvents,
reinvests, its ancestorsthis, too, is

hermeneutics. And so we look back on

Lawrence Sternes Tristram Shandy
(1759-1767) and say, here is an
instance, or an antecedent, of
postmodernism. We can say the same of
Franz Kafkas The Castle (1926) or
Jean-Paul Sartres Nausea (1938) or
James Joyces Finnegans Wake (1939).
But all this simply means that we have
internalized some of the assumptions and
values of postmodernism and that we
now reread the pastindeed, reappropriate itin their terms.
This tendency, inevitable perhaps and
sometimes enabling, can become
offensive when postmodern ideologies
cannibalize the past, incorporating it

wholly into their flesh. Put more

equably, we need to respect the
otherness of the past, though we may be
condemned to revise it even as we
repeat it. In this, as in literary studies
generally, postmodern theory, at its best,
can prove beneficial: it can become a
heightened mode of self-awareness, selfcritical of its own assumptions, its own
bleached myths and invisible theologies,
and tolerant of what is not itself. But this
calls for pragmatism, to avoid the
extremes of dogma and skepticism. For
the latter, as T. S. Eliot said in his Notes
Toward a Definition of Culture, can be a
highly civilized trait, though when it
declines into pyrrhonism, it becomes a
trait from which civilizations can die.

Postmodernism and Pragmatism

Here I must make an excursus on
philosophical pragmatism, one more
crucial word to add to our growing
verbal family.
By 1987, when I published The
Postmodern Turn, I had begun to wonder,
like others, how to recover the creative
impulse of postmodernism without
atavism or reversion, without relapse
into enervated forms or truculent
dogmas, without cynicism or fanaticism.
Facile skepticism lacked conviction;
ideological politics was full of
passionate mendacity. I turned then to the
philosophical pragmatism of William

James and returned to the artistic

pragmatism of John Cage. Both allowed
a place for belief, indeed for unabashed
spirituality, in works like The Will to
Believe and A Year from Monday.
Philosophical pragmatism, of course,
offers no panacea. But its intellectual
generosity; its epistemic or noetic
pluralism; its avoidance of stale debates
(about mind and matter, for instance,
freedom and necessity, nurture and
nature); and its affinities with open,
liberal, multicultural societies, where
issues must be resolved by mediation
and compromise rather than dictatorial
power or divine decreeall these make
it congenial to postmodernism without

acceding to the latters potential for

nihilism, its spirit of feckless and
joyless play.
But the virtues of Emersonian and
Jamesianfar more than Rortian
pragmatism affect literary studies
generally, not only postmodern theory.
(The topic warrants a monograph in
itself.) Perhaps, in anticipation of my
conclusion, I can say simply this: such
virtues are inward with reality. They
resist the hubris of theory, the impatience
of ideology, the rage of our desires and
needsin short, they nurture that
negative capability Keats considered
essential to great literature.

As for Cage, that genius of postmodern

avant-gardes in music, dance, the visual
arts, literature, he carried negative
capability to the thresholds of nondiscrimination. A pragmatist, a
descendant of American
Transcendentalism withal, a disciple of
Zen, Cages sacramental vision of
dispossession, of egolessness, perfuses
his work from first to last. Who has not
heard rise from his aleatory pages
often composed by chance operations
applied to the I ChingCages happy,
open-mouthed laugh, echoing the
practical hilarity of holy fools in times
past as well as the robust, expansive
amiability of William James?

That is the sound of pragmatism, I

submit, whose cadences may calm and
inspire us all, especially in cultural and
postcolonial studies.
Beyond Postmodernism: An
Inconclusion
Throughout this paper, the latent
question has been: what lies beyond
postmodernism? Of course, no one
really knows. But my tacit answer has
been: postmodernity, pulsing on the
Internet. This is no cause to cheer.
Realism teaches us that historical
crises do not always come to happy
resolution; we need to learn what history
can and can not teach. Still, though

inequities and iniquities of existence

may be indurate, they are not all
irremediable in the particular forms they
take.
Two factors aggravate the ordeals of
postmodernity in our time: the glaring
disparities of wealth among and within
nations, and the furies of nationalism,
collective identity, mass feelings. About
the first subject, crucial as it may be, I
will say little: it engages the dismal
sciences of economics and geopolitics,
beyond my reach. About the second, I
will hazard a few remarks.
Much is said about difference, about
otherness, and much of that is in the

hortatory mode. But those who demand

respect for their kind do not always
accord it to other kinds. The fact is that
the human brain exploded mysteriously
into evolution a million or so years ago,
devising hasty strategies for survival,
which include the distinction between
Self and Other, We and Them.
The division is manifest in the
biological world, not only interspecies
(between different species), but also
intraspecies (between individuals of the
same species). That is the miracle of our
immune systems which distinguish
immediately, electro-chemically,
between home bodies and invaders.
Such systems, though, can be fooled

sometimes into attacking friends and

ignoring foesbut that is another story.
The division between Self and Other is
also manifest in nearly all our languages,
in the deep structures of grammar and in
the vocabularies of the different
pronouns. Hence the distinctions we
make between I and You, Us and Them,
We and They, and so forth. Furthermore,
the division is active in the layers of the
psyche, as Freudians and Lacanians
know, in the distinction between Ego
Instincts (self-centered) and Object or
Erotic Instincts (centered on others), as
well as in Lacans Mirror Stage and
Symbolic Order. Most pertinent to our
topic, however, the division is clear in
the evolutionary and historical

development of the family, the group, the

tribe. Human beings would have
perished long ago in the struggle for
evolutionto faster, stronger, fiercer
animals like the saber-toothed tiger
were it not for the human brain, human
languages, and human social
organizations. Hence the profound
instinct of tribalism, which develops
into nationalisms of different kinds,
including ethnic, religious, cultural, and
political nationalism.
This instinct is primalbut also
primitive. The Bulgarian Nobelist Elias
Canetti wrote, in Auto-da-F, about the
mass-soul in ourselves, which foams
like a huge, wild, full-blooded animal.

More soberly, the great biologist, E. O.

Wilson, describes, in Consilience, the
epigenitic rules governing the
practices of kinship, cooperation, and
reciprocal altruism in human societies.
Now, the mass-soul, the herd or tribal
instinct, may be primal. But so is
imagination, so is love, so is the power
of sympathyin short, the power to
vault over distinctions and identify with
others. Moreover, though the division
between Self and Other may have been
once essential to survival, it may be less
so now, may need to assume different
shapes, in our interactive,
interdependent, cybernetic, and glocal
agethis hideous neologism can be

used only oncethe age of

postmodernity.
Still, I do not think that divisions
between Self and Other, Us and Them,
will soon vanish, especially if the
discrepancies of wealth and power
persist in their flagrant forms. But I do
think that, instead of wishing or talking
the distinction away, we can make it
more conscious of itself in our lives.
This requires absolute candor, the
courage to speak the truth to ourselves
and not only to others. Beyond that, we
need to cultivate a keener, livelier, more
dialogical sense of ourselves in relation
to diverse cultures, diverse natures, the
whole universe itself. And we need to

discover modes of self-transcendence,

especially for the wretched of the
earth, that avoid blind identification
with collectives premised on exclusion
of other groups. This, I realize, is far
easier said than done, especially for the
mass-minded in every clime. Still, I
would maintain, that is the spiritual
project of postmodernity, a project to
which literature and all the arts remain
vital.
Of course, we can define the project of
postmodernity simply in political terms
as an open dialogue between local and
global, margin and center, minority and
majority, concrete and universaland
not only between those but also between

local and local, margin and margin,

minority and minority, and further still,
between universals of different kinds.
But there is never surety that a political
dialogue, even the most open, will not
erupt into violence.
To this ancient stain of human violence,
I have no remedy. But I wonder: can
postmodern pragmatism serve us in a
small way? Can the imagination serve us
in larger ways? Will spirit become the
ground from which new ecological and
planetary values spring? Can the Internet
more conjunctive than disjunctive
despite current parodies of Teilhard.com
abet a noetic, holistic apprehension of
reality, which I called in Paracriticisms

the new gnosticism? This I know:

without spirit, the sense of cosmic
wonder, of being and mortality at the
widest edge, which we all share,
existence quickly reduces to mere
survival. Something we need to release
us from the prison-house of tribal
identity, and from the terrible grip of
self-concern. That is spirit.
In this universe, not all the music is of
our own making.

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

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