Like modernism, postmodernism has many definitions and is applied to diverse objects. Jean-Francois Lyotard describes the postmodern condition as a collapse of narratives of legitimation, as "that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable," yet remains "undoubtedly part of the modern."2
Susan Suleiman gives a particularly useful definition. In the introduction to Subversive Intent she writes: "I interpret [postmodernism] as that moment of extreme (perhaps tragic, perhaps playful) self-consciousness when the present -our present-takes to reflecting on its relation to the past and to the future primarily as a problem of repetition. How does one create a future that will acknowledge and incorporate the past-a past that includes, in our very own century, some of the darkest moments in human history-without repeating it?"3
The very name we are giving to this curious condition is indicative of its conflicted relation to the past. If modernism is taken to represent a history that stretches behind us, then this new word, (formed by the attachment of a prefix that indicates anteriority) indicates both a separation from and a connection to that history. The relation between modernism and post- is necessarily complex and conflicted. If we are to think of postmodernism as a condition in which temporality becomes a problem, in which time ceases to progress in a predictable linear way and begins to behave in strange ways that are difficult to understand, then perhaps we must admit that postmodemism is both part of and radically different from modernism
This apparently paradoxical situation appears again and again as postmodem theory attempts to wrangle with given binarisms: subject/object, space/time, idea/material mind/body, nature/culture, essence/context (to name just a few). In each case, where there used to be a clear-cut distinction we find a collapse. Yet within the collapsed structure lies a field of differences. Like the first person in Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, it is "an infinitely hot and dense dot."4
The historical practice of Michel Foucault exemplifies this complexity, in that it is implicated in modemist historiography as it undermines it. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault identifies Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor for and effect of the distributions of power in eighteenth century France. "The Panopticon... must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men."5
But it is an historically discrete level of generality. Discipline and Punish isn't about the present, and it would be a mistake to employ the figure of the Panopticon to describe contemporary social space. Although contemporary life has many features in common with that historical period Foucault calls "classical," the strength of Foucault's re-reading of French history lies precisely in his refusal to fabricate trans-historical universals. In this sense, his understanding of history stands in critical opposition to modernist notions of history as a teleological progression toward a utopian future.
In order to better understand this distinction, let us look briefly at two antecedents to Foucault's historiography. In his lectures on Reason and History, GWF Hegel describes history as a dialectical movement toward the realization of the "Idea," the logical power of divinity, through "Reason," as "Spirit." "Reason is the law of the world and. . . therefore, in world history, things have come about rationally.... That this Idea or Reason be the True, the Eternal the Absolute Power and that it and nothing but it, its glory and majesty, manifests itself in the world... has been proved in philosophy."6
Hegel sees history as a worldly manifestation of philosophical absolutes. Human subjects are thus subjects of history to the extent that they manifest a "will to Spirit," and this "will to Spirit" is itself an historical inevitability. "The Spirit's development, i progression and ascent to an ever higher concept of itself.. is the result, on the one hand, of the inner development of the Idea and, on the other, of the activity of individuals, who are its agents and bring about its actualization."7
It is interesting to read Foucault in light of Hegel's transcendent notion of reason. Unlike Hegel, Foucault does not take the individual as a given. On the contrary, for Foucault, the individual is not an agent of the Idea but an "effect of power." In his published lecture of January 7, 1976, Foucault writes: "The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike... In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals."8
It would seem that power takes a similar [place] in Foucault'S theory that the idea takes in Hegel's. The operative terms (power and Idea) are both ubiquitous and pervasively causal. Power, for Foucault, produces knowledge, histories, subjectivity much as the Idea, for Hegel, is the driving force of philosophy, history and the individual.
The difference is not, as one might suspect, that Hegel's Idea is a positive force where Foucault's power is negative. On the contrary, for Foucault power is productive: "If power were never anything but repressive," Foucault asks, "do you think anyone would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse."9
The crucial difference, if it could be reduced to a single opposition, would be that where Hegel starts with a universal abstraction that has been philosophically derived and proceeds to demonstrate its relation to concrete particularities, Foucault starts with the concrete and particular and proceeds toward abstraction. Where Hegel starts with Reason and finds it actualized in history, Foucault starts with specific institutions such as the prison and the clinic and derives from them descriptions of how power circulates in specific historical periods. Where Hegel's method descends from the general to the specific and the ideal to the material, Foucault conducts "an ascending analysis."10
This allows Foucault to destabilize the abstractions that are used to deduce and thus justify given institutions as historically inevitable. It opposes the descending logic of progress with an adductive critique of historical eventualities. Put simply, it allows us to see that history proceeds not out of necessity but out of contingency, that history is not necessarily as it should or must be but is, rather, the product of a complex and indeterminate set of negotiations.
It is here that Foucault's debt to Karl Marx becomes evident. "In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven." 11
Marx rejects Hegel's idealism, and replaces it with an empirical materialism, an understanding of history as the sum of lived relations between and among classed subjects. Like Foucault after him, Marx begins his analysis of history with observation of concrete phenomena and institutions. "The premises from which we begin are... the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live... These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way."l2
It is this grounding in observation of the material world that situates Marx's political economy under the rubric of the Enlightenment, whose principal project is described by Horkheimer and Adorno as a replacement of religion by science as the principal means of explaining the world. "The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy... On the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning."13
Scientific method emerged during the Enlightenment as a process of testing hypotheses through the execution of repeatable and verifiable experiments. Marxist analysis, then, is a scientific project in that its method shares with science a grounding faith in the utility and reliability of the empirical. But Foucault sees his project (here described as a genealogy) as a resistance to the effects of science on knowledge: "By comparison, then, and in contrast to the various projects which aim to inscribe knowledge in the hierarchical order of power associated with science, a genealogy should be seen kind of attempt to emancipate historical knowledge from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse."14
Marx aspires to science; Foucault seeks to resist it. So while Marx and Foucault share an historical methodology that works "from the ground up," their relation to science is distinct. A further distinction may be drawn between Foucault's emphasis on the micropolitical, "based on a reactivation of local knowledge" 15 and Marx's interest in politics on the macroscopic scale of class struggle.
And where Foucault focuses relentlessly on the past and present, Marx allows himself to imagine the future. His materialist critique of Hegel retains the promise of an eventual utopia in the classless society: "These conditions of life, which different generations find in existence, decide also whether or not the periodically recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of the entire existing system."16 Marx seeks to emancipate history from Hegelian idealism through a materialist empiricism. Foucault attempts to emancipate histories from empiricism through a kind of critical myopia.
Foucault's relation to Hegel on the one hand and Marx on the other is simultaneously one of similarity and difference. Foucault does not so much build on the work of his Germanic forebears as operate in their ruins. His project stands not in dialectical opposition to these modernist historiographies but in complicit contestation. It is implicated by the modern as it resists it. It is this complex and fraught relation to modernism that qualifies Foucault's project as a postmodem one. Fredrick Jameson provides an account of the postmodern that is less complicated than the one I am describing here in terms of its relation to that which preceded it.
In "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," he describes postmodernism as a discrete historical epoch that began in the United States with the post-war economic boom. For Jameson, postmodern culture is a set of "specific reactions against the established forms of high modernism."l7
But it is also, in Jameson's view, the "cultural logic of late capitalism," an effect of a specific political-economic order. Postmodernism is thus "a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order-what is often euphemistically called modernization, postindustrial or consumer society, the society of the media or the spectacle, or multinational capitalism." One is reminded here of Marx's optical analogy: "If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical lifeprocess as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical lifeprocess."18
Through this wonderful trope, ideology emerges as the topsy-turvy projection of material history, much as culture, in Jameson's analysis, is an effect of political economy. Though in Jameson's account the relation is, unfortunately, more straight-forward.
But if Jameson's analysis succumbs to a surplus of discretion in its description of the relations between postmodem culture and modernism on the one hand and late capitalism on the other, it manages an account of postmodern temporality that is more sophisticated. He describes this temporality in terms of schizophrenia.
Jameson's deployment of schizophrenia "is meant to be descriptive and not diagnostic."l9 In Lacanian psychoanalysis, schizophrenia is a failure on the part of the subject to accede into language. Schizophrenia is thus a "breakdown of the relationship between signifiers. For Lacan, the experience of temporality. . . is also an effect of language. It is because language has a past and a future, because the sentence moves in time, that we have what seems to us a concrete or lived experience of time. But since the schizophrenic does not know language articulation in that way, he or she does not have our experience of temporal continuity either, but is condemned to live a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future."20
This account of postmodern temporality is strikingly similar to the one that Suleiman describes. And it resonates with the difference between a modernist historiography that presupposes progress and a postmodernist one that refuses to imagine a strong continuity between past, present and future.
An effect of this schizophrenic temporality is that "the experience of the present becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and 'material.'"21 If postmodernism is, as Jameson suggests, an effect of post-industrial capitalism, then Southern California is a quintessential example of postmodern social space, since the vast majority of its urban space has been constructed since World War II. This idea of postmodernism as an a historical condition helps to explain the rampant commodity fetishism and obsessive concern with surfaces, as well as the historical dislocation and lack of foresight that are manifested in typically Southern Californian phenomena such as auto detailing and cheap stucco strip malls, plastic surgery and "Los Angelization."
In a dossier on the exhibition Les Immateriaux, Lyotard relates this idea of postmodern time to the urban space of Southern California. ' When you drive from San Diego to Santa Barbara... you go through a zone of 'conurbation...' The opposition between a centre and a periphery disappears, as does the opposition between an inside (the city of men) and an outside (nature)... This is the kind of space-time... which has been chosen for 'the Immaterials.'"22 As spatial oppositions collapse into each other, so does the opposition between space and time. What emerges is a schizo-space of glowing surfaces and accelerated movement.
A crucial feature of this emergence is the increasing mediation of new technologies. Technologies are not sets of material objects, but means through which objects and discourses are produced. I am thinking here particularly of technologies of electronic representation and communication such as television, telephony, computing and digital imaging. These technologies are both manifestations and producers of postmodernity. Lyotard writes: "Technology is not the cause of the decline of the modern figure; rather, it is one of its signs."23 Much as political-economy and cultural conditions produce each other in a symbiotic relation, technologies and the social field are engaged in a circular dynamic.
By increasing the speed of communications, new technologies participate in a collapse of spatial distances. As schizophrenia, the postmodern condition is both a problem of space-time and a crisis of subjectivity. The modern conception of the human subject as a willful agent and unique, individual author ceases to obtain. As Jameson writes, "the modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity... which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world."24 It becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to maintain this (illusory) uniqueness if the face of a world that is hypersaturated with technologically mediated representations. postmodern subjectivity appears as a negotiation of programmed experiences, a reinscription of persistent simulations of an ever- more-remote "real."
Lyotard explains the collapse of the modem subject as an uncertainty in the relation between human agency and the world of objects, matter and mind. "In the tradition of modernity, the relationship between human beings and materials is fixed by the Cartesian program of mastering and possessing nature."25 As another implosion of binary oppositions into uncertainty, this collapse is a familiar trope of the postmoderm. Lyotard links the "death of the subject" directly to these new technologies: "Man's anxiety is that he is losing his (so called) identity as a 'human being.' One aspect of 'immaterials...' is that they imply just such a loss of identity... Most of these 'immaterials' are generated from computer end electronics technosciences..."26
In the so called "immaterial the distinction between medium and message cannot be maintained. The binary codes of computer software and electromagnetic waves of radio and television broadcasts are immaterializations of both signifier and signified at the same time. They stand as instances of the poststructural, non- binary sign. They frustrate a program of modern agency in which the subject exerts her or his will on the object in a transformative project of production. The immaterials resist objectification because they are always already in play. In his examination of French history, Foucault sees the Panopticon as a technology of power. "In Discipline and Punish what I wanted to show was how... there was a veritable technological take-off the productivity of power."27 As we seek to describe postmodernism as a productive effect of a specific historical moment then, we might look at the model of the net as a paradigm for the contemporary distribution of power. The net describes a network of linked communications networks, a computerized fabric of information.
As more and more significant interactions take place on the net, it becomes increasingly important to situate it historically. I am suggesting that the net is to postmodern relations in the West what the Panopticon is to Classical" relations of power in France. In a discussion of contemporary power relations, Foucault himself writes: "power establishes a network through which it freely circulates."28 In the Panoptic regime, power is concentrated in a centre that exerts control over the periphery through an apparatus of visibility.
Those on the periphery internalize the controlling effects of the gaze, policing their own behaviours and desires. With the net, power is no longer centralized: it offers a structure without a centre and periphery. Like the "conurban" topography of Southern California, it consists of a dispersed array of nodes that are connected by a vascular system of arteries and capillaries of comnmunication. Power is not exerted and internalized through a visual economy; it is already diffused, and reproduces itself constantly and incessantly as each node interacts on the network in a multiplicitous economy of visual, textual and auditory signs . Information on the net is encoded, compressed and encrypted through the digital technology of binary code. All information on the net is always reduced to a stream of ones and zeros. In the Panopticon, both the macrostructure and the microstructure are binary. Center is paired and opposed to periphery; gaze is a relation of seer to seen. The net, on the other hand, has a non-binary macrostructure, but its microstructure is, ultimately, binary code itself. I take this as yet another example of the nets paradigmatic stature within postmodernism, since at the level of its basic structures, it is at once plural and binary, simultaneously one thing and the other.
The net is a space of instantaneous and interactive communication. In his discussion of an earlier phase in the development of communication technologies, Walter Benjamin describes the effects of the reduction of the distance between representations and the objects they refer to. "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction," he writes, "is the aura."29 In the postmodern age of electronic communication, the aura has collapsed entirely. Where the delay between the production and reception of visual and textual signs moved from slow to fast in the industrial age, the lag can now be measured only in nanoseconds. And where production and reception were once distinct and qualitatively removed from each other, they now merge into a complex textual practice. Reading becomes a form of writing, and vice versa. Messages float freely, disassociated from their producers. As a result, textual producers on the net can no longer be seen as authors in the modernist sense. With electronic mail, for example, messages are easily modified and forwarded, but the changes and the 'original' source or, more precisely, starting point, cannot be determined. The Barthesian move from work to text transpires in a burst of electromagnetic impulses.30 In "chat" spaces where real-time conversations take place through a textual interface, distinctions between speech and writing begin to dissolve. What emerges with the net is an environment that can be described more readily as a mode of intertexuality than in terms of embodied subjects in space.
The net enacts and is reproduced in the disembodiment of the human subject. Participants interact as discursive entities whose physiological properties cannot be deduced by the messages they send and receive. Identity is no longer determined by a body whose gender is fixed in a male/female logic of genital configuration. The performative qualities of identity are foregrounded to the extent that it can no longer be seen as a fixed and persistent set of qualities, and becomes eminently contingent and continually reproduced in specific discursive contexts.
The net, then, is a post-human environment where communities are established not by spatial proximity but through discursive affinities. In the net, post-human subjects group themselves and are grouped by shared interests and communication styles.
I have described postmodernism as an implosion of binary relations into a dense and uncertain field of shifting differences. This collapse is reproduced as a crisis of subjectivity and a problem of time. Much of the popular discussion of the new technologies of electronic communication is focused on the future. What impact will they have on our cultures and institutions? How will they change us? It seems that the idea of the future is once again encroaching on the the present. But this imagination of the future isn't tantamount to a recapitulation of modernist progress. It is almost as if the future has ceased to recede into posteriority, and has begun to arrive in the present. Does this nascent ability to imagine a future in the present tense indicate that we are emerging into a new paradigm whose name will not include in its body the word "modern?" It is impossible to know.