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Postmodernism in Parallax Author(s): Hal Foster Reviewed work(s): Source: October, Vol. 63 (Winter, 1993), pp. 3-20 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778862 . Accessed: 08/10/2012 21:45

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http://www.jstor.org Postmodernismin Parallax*

HAL FOSTER

Whatever happened to postmodernism?The darling of journalism, it has become the Baby Jane of criticism.Not so long ago the opposite was the case; prominenttheorists on the leftsaw grand thingsin the term.For Jean-Frangois Lyotard postmodernismmarked an end to the masternarratives that had long made modernityseem synonymouswith progress (the march of reason, the accumulation of wealth,the advance of technology,the emancipation of work- ers, and so on), while for FredricJameson postmodernisminvited a new nar- rative,or rather a renewed Marxian critique that mightrelate differentstages of modern culture to differentmodes of capitalistproduction. For me as for many others,postmodernism signaled a need to break withan exhausted modernism, the dominant model of which focused on the formal values of art to the neglectnot only of its historicaldeterminations but also of its transformative possibilities.Thus even withinthe left- especiallywithin the left- postmodern- ism was a disputed category.And yet, not so long ago, there was a time of a loose alliance, a sense of a common project,especially in opposition to rightist positions,which ranged fromold attackson modernismin toto(as the source of all evil in our hedonisticsociety) to new defenses of particularmodernisms that had become official,indeed traditional,the modernismsof the museum and the academy. For this last position postmodernismcould only be "the revenge of the philistines"(the happy phrase of Hilton Kramer), the vulgar kitschof media hucksters,lower classes, and inferiorpeoples, a new barbarism to be shunned, like multiculturalismtoday, at all costs. In part our postmodernism was a refusal of this reactionarycultural politic and an advocacy of practices both criticalof institutionalmodernism and suggestiveof alternativeforms, of new ways to practice culture and politics. And we did not lose. In a sense a worse thing happened: treatedas a fashion,postmodernism became demode.

* This text was writtenfor a conferenceon postmodernismat the Universityof Washington in May 1992 convoked by Charles Altieri,whom I want to thank for the kind invitation.I also want to thank two friendsat Cornell, Mark Seltzer and GeoffreyWaite, for much sympatheticcriticism.

OCTOBER 63, Winter1993. ? 1993 4 OCTOBER

Of course, the categorywas not only emptied by the media; it was also critiqued withinthe left,often with good reason. Despite its announcementof the end of master narratives,the Lyotardian (or poststructuralist)version of postmodernismwas regarded as just the latestproper name of the West,a West now narcissisticallyobsessed with its own postcolonialdecline. So too, despite its attention to the capitalistdynamic of fragmentation,the Jamesonian (or Marxian) version of postmodernismwas considered too totalistic,not sensitive enough to differentdifferences. Finally, the art-criticalversion of postmodernism was seen to seal modernismin the veryformalist mold that we wanted to break. In the process the termbecame not only banal but incorrect. I too became suspicious of the term. And yet recentlymy attitude has shiftedin a way that I can now only express anecdotally.In April 1992 I spent a few days in Detroit, a cityoccupied three times by the army,wounded by white flight,damaged by Reagan-Bush neglect. There the white touristtends to travel from one cosmetic fortressto another. On one such trek my group stopped at Highland Park, the primarysite of the Ford Model T, the first factorywith an assembly line, the paradigm of Taylorist labor around the modern world. On cue our taxi, a Ford, broke down, and so we were stranded at this rusted plant, perhaps the most importantsite in twentieth-centuryin- dustry,now lost between a deindustrialcity core and a posturban residential ring,witness to the uneven developmentof our late-capitalistspace-times, in a purgatorybetween modern and postmodernworlds. There I again saw thatthe categoryof postmodernismmight still be used to thinksuch a strangechrono- tropic terrain,one not unique to Detroit,of fortressedcities armored against urban inhabitantsand industrialremains suspended in twilightzones. How does one map such a space, measure such a time? Such an anecdote mightlead one to the model of postmodernismdevel- oped byJameson over the last decade throughwhich he relatesdifferent stages of Western culture to differentmeans of capitalistproduction. To do so he adapts the long-wave theoryof economic cycles propounded by the Marxian economist Ernest Mandel, according to which the capitalistWest has passed through four fifty-yearperiods since the late eighteenth century (roughly twenty-fiveyears each of expansion and stagnation):the industrialrevolution (until the politicalcrises of 1848) marked by the spread of handcraftedsteam engines, followed by three furthertechnological epochs --the first(until the 1890s) marked by the spread of machined steam engines; the second (until World War II) marked by the spread of electricand combustionengines; and the third (our own) marked by the spread of machined electronicand nuclear systems.'Mandel relates these technologicaldevelopments to economic stages:

1. See Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism(1972), trans.Joris De Bres (London: Verso, 1978), and FredricJameson, Postmodernism,or The CulturalLogic of Late Capitalism(Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). Postmodernismin Parallax 5

from market capitalism to monopoly capitalism (around the last fin-de-siecle) to multinationalcapitalism (in our own millennialmoment). Jameson in turn relates these economic stages to artisticparadigms: the world view of realistart and literatureincited by the pragmatic individualismencouraged by market capitalism; the subjectivistabstraction of high-modernistart and literaturein response to the complexity,indeed the opacity,of bureaucraticlife under monopoly capitalism;and the pasticheof postmodernistpractices (art, architecture, fiction,film, food, and fashion) as a symptomof the dispersed borders, the mixed spaces, of multinationalcapitalism. His model is hardlyas mechanical or deterministicas my precis: Jameson stressesthat this development is very uneven, that each period is a palimpsest of emergent and residual forms,that there is never a clean break fromone to the next. Nevertheless,his account has itscritics. I noted the charge thatit is too totalistic,that it sees the logic of capital as a great reaper that sweeps up everythingin its path. For my purposes it is too spatialistic,not sensitiveenough to the differentspeeds as well as the mixed spaces of postmodern society,to the deferred action as well as the incessant expansion of capitalistculture. I borrow the notion of deferred action (Nachtrdglichkeit)from Freud, for whom subjectivity,never set once and for all, is structuredin a series of antic- ipations and reconstructionsof events that are often traumaticin nature: we come to be who we are only in deferred action. I believe modernism and postmodernismare comprehended, if not constituted,in an analogous way, in deferredaction, as a continualprocess of anticipationand reconstruction.2Every epoch dreams the next, as Walter Benjamin once remarked,but by the same token it also (re)constructsthe one before it. There is no simple Now: every present is nonsynchronous,a mix of differenttimes.3 Thus there is never a

2. The classic discussion occurs in the Wolfmancase history,"From the Historyof an Infantile Neurosis" (1914/18). This slippage between "comprehended" and "constituted"is not only my vacillation;it operates in the veryconcept of deferredaction, where the traumaticscene is famously ambiguous: is it actual, fantasmatic,and/or analytically constructed? My application of this concept is a stretch.In a future text I will develop its possible uses for (post)moderniststudies (especially around questions of retrospectionand repetitionin the avant-garde)as well as its potentialabuses. For the time being, I can only assert that psychoanalysisis not restrictedto the individual subject, even as I can only admit that most applications to culturalhistory tend to psychologizeit. Even as I intend to complicate "development" with "deferred action," with the nonlinear and the never- complete, my extension of a concept regardingthe (re)constructionof the individual subject to the (re)constructionof a historical"subject" is fraughtwith dangers. For example, can I address the categoryof the subjecthistorically if mymodel of historypresupposes itslogic? Is thisa productively deconstructivedouble-bind or a paralyticallyparadoxical one? (For the persistenceof the logic of the subject in psychoanalysis,see Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen,The Freudian Subject,trans. Catherine Porter [Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1988].) 3. See Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire:A LyricPoet in theEra ofHigh Capitalism(London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 176. In "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940) he all but proposes a historicalNachtrdglichkeit. The classic text on the nonsynchronousis Ernst Bloch, Heritageof Our Times (1935), trans. N. and S. Plaice (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1990), especially "Non-Contemporaneityand Obligation to Its Dialectic." 6 OCTOBER

timelytransition, say, between the modern and the postmodern:our consciousness of a period not only comes after the fact; it is also always in parallax. (Postmodernism,in short,is like sex[uality]:it comes too earlyor too late.) This is abstractas yet,so let me ground it in one possible account of the never-completetransition to the postmodern.Rather than use the cumbersome Mandelian scheme of four fifty-yearperiods of the modern West, I want to focus on three moments thirtyyears apart withinthe twentiethcentury: the mid-1930s,which I take to be the end of the great modernisms;the mid-1960s, which marks the full advent of postmodernism;and our own 1990s; and I will do so throughparticular texts. I will treatthese momentsin a discursivesense, to see how historicalshifts may be registeredin theoreticaltexts, which in turn will serve as both objects of historicizationand means to historicize.At once arbitraryand symptomatic,my narrativewill not say much about art. Instead, in addition to technologicalimbrications in culturalpractices (which tend to be too privilegedin these accounts), I want to address certainchanges in Western conceptions of the individual subject and of the culturalother over this time. My reason for this focus is simple. The quintessentialmodern question con- cerned identity:Who are we? Most oftenanswers came by way of an appeal to an otherness,either to the unconscious withinor to cultural others without.4 Many modernistsfelt truth was located there: hence the significanceof Freud and the profusionof primitivismsthroughout the century.Indeed, many mod- ernistsconflated these two sites,the unconscious and the culturalother, while some postmodernistsargue that both are now penetrated by capitalism,that these two natural preservesare acculturated.5In any case, since theyspeak to the question of identity,the two discoursesof the unconsciousand the cultural other,i.e., psychoanalysisand anthropology,are the mostprivileged of modern human sciences.6As such they may registermore seismographicallythan any other discourses the epistemologicalchanges that may help us to define a postmodernismthat is not onlyjournalistic. Each moment that interestsme here representsa significantshift in discourses on the subject, the cultural other, and technology.In the mid-1930s

4. The modernityof "Man and His Doubles" is developed in Michel Foucault, The Orderof Things(1966; New York: Vintage, 1973). 5. This figureof the natural preserve (which Freud uses in relation to fantasy)may smuggle into postmoderndiscourse a romanticlapsarianism whereby the unconsciousand the other,thought to be outside of history,can onlybe contaminatedby it. This is not trueof "the politicalunconscious" of Jameson, and yet in "Periodizingthe 60s" he too speaks of a colonized unconscious (in The 60s withoutApology, ed. Sohnya Sayres et al. [Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1984]). As regards the cultural other, Baudrillard goes further:cyrogenized, "we are all Tasaday" ("The Precessionof the Simulacra,"Art & Text11 [Spring 1983], p. 10). In Jamesonthis other lost natural enclave is the precapitalistThird World agriculturepenetrated by the technocratic"Green Revo- lution" of the 1960s. 6. On this privilegesee Foucault, The Orderof Things,pp. 373-86. Also see Jacques Derrida, "Structure,Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,"in Writingand Difference,trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1978), p. 382. Postmodernismin Parallax 7

Jacques Lacan was at work on the formationof the I, the firstversion of his famous "MirrorStage" paper; Claude Levi-Strausswas involvedin the Brazilian field work that revealed the mythologicalsophistication of "the savage mind"; and Walter Benjamin was about to publish his great text on the cultural rami- ficationsof modern technologies,"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."By the 1960s each of these discourseshad changed dramatically. The death of the subject, not its formation,was detailed by Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes (some of whom dated itsdisappearance to the revoltsof 1968). So too, the anthropological other,inspired by the liberationwars of the 1950s, had begun to talk back, i.e., to be heard for the firsttime, most brilliantlyin the rewritingof the Hegelian- Marxian master-slavedialectic by Frantz Fanon, whose The Wretchedof the Earth was published in 1961. Meanwhile,the penetrationof media into psychicstruc- tures and social relations had reached a new level, which was seen in two complementaryways - chiliasticallyby Guy Debord as an intensityof reification in his Societyof theSpectacle of 1967 and ecstaticallyby Marshall McLuhan as an "extension of man" in his UnderstandingMedia of 1964. What has changed in these three discourses since then? In a sense the death of the subject is now dead in its turn: the subject has returned- but in the guise of a politicsof new, ignored, and differentsubjectivities, sexualities, and ethnicities.Meanwhile, at a timewhen First,Second, and Third Worlds are no longer distinct(if they ever were), anthropologyis newlycritical of its own protocols,and postcolonialimbrications have complicatedanticolonial confron- tations.7Finally, even as our societyremains one of spectacular images a la Debord, it is also one of electronicdiscipline- or, if you preferthe technophilic version after McLuhan, a societyof electronicfreedom, of the new possibilities that await us in cyberspace,virtual reality, and the like. My purpose is not to prove one position right,the other wrong, nor to assert that one moment is modern, the next post, foragain none of thisdevelops evenlyor breaks cleanly. Instead I want to suggest that each theoryspeaks of changes in its present,but only indirectly--in reconstructionof past moments (when these changes are said to have begun) and in anticipationof futuremoments (when these changes are projected to be complete). Thus the deferredaction, the double movement, of modern and postmoderntimes.8

7. This is not to suggest a narrativeof naive simplificationsfollowed by self-consciouscompli- cations. On the contrary,the postcolonialhas not demystified,let alone displaced, the (neo)colonial. 8. Thus, for example, the discourse of the death of the subject is not proper to the 1960s; it is announced in the 1930s: not only by Benjamin (who, in the Artworkessay as well as "The Author as Producer," foresees the artistic-authorial"functions" as "incidental") but by Bataille, different Dadaists, Surrealists,and Constructivists,many others. In a sense it is only recapitulated in the 1960s. And yet it is this recapitulationthat is its articulation,at least as a characteristicideologeme; that is my point. My use of the term"the subject" (as well as the term "the culturalother") will slip 8 OCTOBER

First,let me consider,very schematically and selectively,the discourse on the subject over these three moments,and here as elsewhere I will take only landmark examples. In the "Mirror Stage" paper, Lacan argues that the formation of our ego restson a primordialapprehension of our body in a mirror (though any reflectionwill do), an anticipatoryimage of a bodily unitythat as infantswe do not yet possess in actuality.It is this image that founds our ego in thisinfantile moment, but foundsit as imaginary,as locked in an identification that is always also an alienation,for at the verymoment that we see our self in the mirrorwe see this self as image, as other. ImportantlyLacan also suggests that this imaginaryunity of the mirrorstage produces a retroactivefantasy of a prior stage when our body was still in pieces, a fantasyof a chaotic body, fragmentaryand fluid,given over to drivesthat alwaysthreaten to overwhelm us, a fantasythat haunts us in differentways for the rest of our life (all those moments of pressure when you feel you are about to shatter).In a sense our ego is pledged firstand foremostagainst the returnof thisbody in pieces; it is this that turns the ego into an armor (a term Lacan uses) to be deployed aggressivelyagainst the chaotic world withinand without- but especiallywith- out, especiallyagainst all otherswho seem to representthis chaos for us.9 Lacan does not specifyhis theoryof the subject as historical,but I believe we must, forthis traumatized, armored, and aggressivesubject is notjust any being across historyand culture: it is a theoryof the modern subject as fascisticsubject. In other words,inscribed in thistheory is a contemporaryhistory of whichfascism is the most extreme symptom:a historyof world war and militarymutilation, of industrialdiscipline and machinicfragmentation, of mercenarymurder and politicalterror. It is in traumaticrelation to such military-industrialevents that the modern subjectbecomes armored- againstotherness within (sexuality, the unconscious) and othernesswithout (for the fascistthis can mean Jews,Com- munists,gays, women), all figuresof thisfear of the body in pieces come again, of the body given over to the fragmentaryand the fluid. (Has this fascistic

in the course of this text: from the ego as body-image(not yet properlya subject), to the artist- author "function,"to multiculturalidentities. Sometimes this slippage is my own theoreticalweak- ness; sometimesit speaks to historicalshifts. 9. In "The Mirror Stage" (1936/49) Lacan writesof "the armour of an alienatingidentity," a trope repeated in "Aggressivityin Psychoanalysis"(1948), its companion piece in Ecrits(trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Norton, 1977]). In "Some Reflectionson the Ego," a related paper read to the BritishPsychoanalytical Society on May 2, 1951, the trope reappears as the "narcissisticshield, with its nacreous coveringon which is painted the world fromwhich [the ego] is forevercut off." Here Lacan is led to question the veryvalue of a "strongego." Could its aggressivity,a "correlative tendency"of itsnarcissistic basis and itsparanoic structure,also be outside of the struggleto stabilize it? 'i!? ......

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Hans Bellmer. Poup~e. 1934. Joseph Thorak. Comradeship. 1937. Ira

reaction not in part returned?Did it ever go away? Does it not rest potentially withinus all? Or is to generalize it in thisway to normalizeit over much?)"' What happens to this theoryof the formationof the subject in the 1960s when the death of the subject is proclaimed? This is a moment of radically differenthistorical forces and intellectualcurrents. In Paris it is the twilightof

10. I suggested a fascisticreferent of the Lacanian account of the ego in "Armor Fou," October 56 (Spring 1991). Susan Buck-Morssdeveloped this connection in "Aestheticsand Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's ArtworkEssay Reconsidered,"October 62 (Fall 1992), and inspiredby her text I returnto it here. It is said that Lacan presentedthe firstversion of the "MirrorStage" paper at the FourteenthCongress of the InternationalPsychoanalytical Association in Marienbad on August 3, 1936, i.e., in the midst of the Nazi Olympics: "The day aftermy address on the mirrorstage, I took a day off,anxious to get a feelingof the times,heavy withpromises, at the Berlin Olympiad. [Ernst Kris] gentlyobjected 'Ca ne sepfiitpas!"' (Ecrits,p. 239). To suggestsuch a historicalreferent for the Lacanian ego is no doubt offensive.But no less a commentatorthan Jacques-Alain Miller has also posed such a referent,albeit a ratherdifferent one: "There is, therefore,a single ideology of which Lacan provides the theory:that of the 'modern ego,' thatis to say,the paranoic subjectof scientificcivilization, of which a warped psychologytheorizes the imaginary,at the serviceof free enterprise"(Ecrits, p. 322). Moreover,Philippe Lacoue-Labartheand Jean-Luc Nancy have recently argued that"the ideologyof the subject. . . is fascism"("The Nazi Myth,"Critical Inquiry 16 [Winter 1990], p. 294). 10 OCTOBER

structuralism,i.e., of the linguisticparadigm in which all cultural activity(the mythsof Indian groups for Levi-Strauss,the structureof the unconscious for Lacan, the modes of Paris fashionsfor Barthes) is recoded as a language. It is thislinguistic recoding thatallows Foucault to announce in 1966 the erasure of man, the great riddle of modernity,"like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea."" It is also this recoding that permitsBarthes to declare in 1968 the toppling of the author, the great protagonistof humanist-modernistculture, into the play of signs of the Text, which henceforthwill replace the Work of Art. Now this Barthesian formulationmay help us to specifythe figurethat is under attack here: it is not only the authorial artistof humanist-modernist tradition;it is also the authoritarianpersonality of fasciststructures, the figure who compels singular speech and forbidspromiscuous signification(after all this is the 1960s, the days of rage againstall such authoritarianinstitutions). In a sense it is an attackon the fascisticsubject as indirectlycontemplated by Lacan, an attack also made withthe veryforces that this subject most fears: sexuality and the unconscious, desire and the drives,the jouissance (the privilegedterm of French theoryduring this time) that shattersthe subject,that surrendersit preciselyto the fragmentaryand the fluid."2All of these forceswere celebrated in art, theory,and praxis,all to challenge the fascisticsubject, a challenge made programmaticin Deleuze and Guattari'sAnti-Oedipus of 1972. There an appeal to schizophrenia is made as a way not only to disrupt the armored fascistic subject but also to exceed the rapacious capitalistone. Yet thisappeal is tricky, for if the fascisticsubject is threatenedby schizophrenicfragments and flows, the capitalistsubject thriveson such disruptivemovements. Indeed, according to Deleuze and Guattari,only absolute schizophrenia is more schizophrenicthan capital, more given over to decodings of fixed subjectsand structures.On this account what dispersed the subject, humanistor fascistic,in the 1960s, what disrupted its institutions,was a revolutionaryforce, a whole congeries of such forces (ex-colonial, civil-rights,feminist, student), but it was a revolutionary force that, if not directed by capital, was at least released by it- for what is more radical than capital when it comes to old subjectsand structuresthat stand in its way? Tendentious though it is, this argumentmight then be extended to the present returnof the subject,by which I mean the partial recognitionof new and ignored subjectivitiesin identitypolitics and multiculturalmodels. On the one hand, the partial recognitionof differentsubjectivities, sexual and ethnic, in the 1990s reveals that the subject pronounced dead in the 1960s was a very

11. See Foucault, The Orderof Things,pp. 381-87, here 387. "Since man was constitutedat a time when language was doomed to dispersion,will he not be dispersed when language regains its unity?" 12. In Barthes the challenge ofjouissance is directedat the connoisseurof plaisir;its class enemy (so to speak) is less fascisticthan bourgeois,even consumerist. Postmodernismin Parallax 11

particular one, not to be mourned by all: white, bourgeois, humanist, male, heterosexual, a subject who only pretended to be universal. (Often taken for granted today, this revelationwas the difficultlabor of much analysis,first in feminismand then in gay and lesbian studies and multiculturalcritiques.)'3 On the other hand, the present context of these differentsubjectivities, brazenly definedby Bush as The New World Order, suggeststhat the death of the subject then and the birthof the multiculturalsubject now mustalso be seen in relation to the dynamic of capital, its reificationand fragmentationof fixed positions. Thus, even as we celebrate "hybridity"and "heterogeneity,"we must remember that these are privilegedterms of advanced capitalismas well, that social mul- ticulturalismcoexists with economic multinationalism.Such a vision is not as totalisticor fatalisticas it sounds, for no order, capitalist or otherwise,can entirelycontrol the forces that it releases. Rather,as Marx as well as Foucault suggest,a regime of power does not forbidits resistanceso much as it prepares it,calls it into being, in waysthat cannot alwaysbe recouped. This is true of the release of differentsubjectivities, sexual and ethnic,in The New World Order today. Yet it is also true that these forcesneed not be articulatedprogressively. And certainlythey can provoke reactive responses- though to blame these forces for such national figuresas Duke, Buchanan, Bush, and Quayle is truly to blame the victims,an ethical positionthat, perversely, these figuresnow also want to arrogate.

Let me leave this skewed historyof the subject there,and pass abruptlyto the second discourse that may help us to registerthe never-completetransition to the postmodern: the discourse on the culturalother. Here too I willhighlight but three moments. The first,the mid-1930s in Western Europe, might be illuminated by a stark symptomaticjuxtaposition. In 1931 a large exhibition concerning the French colonies was held in Paris to which the Surrealistsre- sponded with a small anti-imperialistshow titled"The Truth about the Colo- nies." These artistsnot only appreciated tribal art, not only appropriated its formal and expressive values, as the Cubists and the Expressionistshad done; they also attended to its political ramificationsin the present. Indeed, they constructeda chiasmic identificationwith the colonial others who, though they were the legatees of such tribal art, were made to disappear in its Western

13. Here again an instanceof deferredaction in postmodernculture. On the one hand, even as these critiques multiplythe subject, they often reinstateits logic. On the other hand, theycannot be opposed to the discourse of the death of the subject,for theyare partlyprepared by it. On this last point see Ernesto Laclau, "Universalism,Particularism, and the Question of Identity,"October 61 (Summer 1992)...... !. lIll l !II . I. . .

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delectation. On the one hand, the Surrealistsargued that these oppressed peoples were like exploited workersin the Westto be supportedin similarways. (This potential solidaritybetween the colonial and the proletariatwas later advanced by Aime Cesaire, among others, who was greatlyadmired by the Surrealists.)On the other hand, the Surrealistsannounced that they too were primitives,that, as moderns given over to object desire, theytoo were fetishists. In effect,they transvalued the revaluationof fetishismperformed in the anal- yses of commodityfetishism and fetishisticperversion: if Marx and Freud used the term as a critique of moderns, the Surrealiststook it as a compliment.In this way they embraced this perceived otherness for its disruptivepotential, again throughan associationbetween the culturalother and the unconscious.14 Yet thisassociation remained primitivist:it stillassumed a racialistanalogy between "primitive"peoples and primal stages of psychosexuallife. And in a differentcultural politic it had a disastrous use, i.e., in Nazism. By 1937 the Nazis had produced the infamous exhibitionson "degenerate" art and music

14. In thissense the Surrealistsubject was otherto the fascisticsubject as indirectlycontemplated by Lacan (who workedin the milieuof the Surrealists).In "ArmorFou" I argue thatsome Surrealists countered the fascisticsubject with"imagoes of the fragmentedbody" (e.g., Bellmer),while others did so withtropes of the heterogeneousand the acephalic (e.g., Bataille). Postmodernismin Parallax 13

that condemned all modernisms-but especially ones that connected the cultural other and the unconscious,here the arts of "the primitive,"the child, and the insane, in order to deploy the disruptiveotherness of such alien figures.An ideal to the Surrealists,this primitivistfantasm was an enormous threat to the fascisticsubject, who also associated it withJews and Communists,for it rep- resented precisely the "degenerate" forces that threatened its armored identity--again, both from withinand from without.Thus, if the Surrealists embraced "the primitive,"the fascistsabjected it: for the firstit could not be close enough; for the second it was always too close. In the mid-1930s, then, a time of revolt and reaction at home and in the colonies, the question of the other for the European, on the leftas well as on the right,was one of "correct distance." I borrow this ambiguous term (replete with its nastynote of proper dis- dain) from the cultural critic Catherine Clement, who points out that at the momentwhen Lacan delivered the "MirrorStage" paper in Nazi GermanyLevi- Strauss was in the Amazon at workon "the ethnologicalequivalent of the mirror stage." "In both cases," Clement writes,"the question involvedis one of correct distance."'5 What this might mean in the case of Lacan is fairlyclear, for the "Mirror Stage" concerns the negotiationof distance between the fledglingego and its image, between the infantand its mother.But what mightit mean for Levi-Strauss?A firstresponse is also fairlyclear: it too concerns the negotiation of distance, here between the anthropologicalparticipant-observer, the home culture,and the culture of study.'6But what mightit mean specificallyfor L vi- Strauss in the mid-1930s, a friend of the Surrealists,a Jew who departed a Europe on the verge of fascism?For thisanthropologist, who has done so much to critique the categoryof race, to reenvision"the savage mind" as logical and the modern mind as mythical,the fascistextreme of nonidentificationwith the other was obviouslydisastrous, but the Surrealisttendency to over-identification was also potentiallyproblematic. For while the firstdestroyed difference bru- tally,the second was perhaps too eager to appropriate difference,to assume it, to become it. A certain distance from the other was necessaryafter all. (Did Levi-Strauss see this danger not only in the more excessive deformationsof Surrealist art, but also in the more extreme experiments of the College de Sociologie?)

15. Catherine Clement, The Lives and Legendsof Jacques Lacan, trans.Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1983), p. 76. 16. "There is no way out of the dilemma: either the anthropologistadheres to the norms of his own group and other groups inspire in him no more than a fleetingcuriosity which is never quite devoid of disapproval, or he is capable of givinghimself wholeheartedly to these other groups and his objectivityis vitiatedby the fact that,intentionally or not, he has had to withholdhimself from at least one society,in order to devote himselfto all. He thereforecommits the verysin that he lays at the door of those who contestthe exceptionalsignificance of his vocation"(Tristes Tropiques [1955], trans.J. and D. Weightman[New York: Atheneum, 1978], p. 384). 14 OCTOBER

Twentyyears later,with the publicationof TristesTropiques, his memoirof thistime, the question of correctdistance was reframed.The primarythreat to the other was no longer from fascismbut from "monoculture,"i.e., the en- croachmentof the capitalistWest on the rest of the world. (At one point Levi- Strauss writes of entire Polynesian islands turned into aircraftcarriers, and whole areas of Asia and Africabecome dingysuburbs and shantytowns.)17 One must argue with this fatalisticvision of an exotic world on the wane, which locates its only authenticmoment in its precontactpast, especiallyso since this remorse about the pure other lost overthere can flipinto a reactionagainst the dirtyother found righthere.'8 Nevertheless,it does set the dominanttone of the Westerndiscussion of correctdistance vis-a-visthe other in the mid-1960s. No doubt to thisother in the contextof liberationwars fromAlgeria to Viet Nam, such a discussionwas a cruel farce,preposterously belated in itsliberal concern afterdecades of colonialisttrauma. How could one speak, a FrantzFanon might ask, of correctdistance when colonialistdomination had overcoded both bodies and psyches of colonized and colonizer alike? And yet this is exactly what concerns Fanon in a text like "On National Culture," firstdelivered to the second Congress of Black Writersand Artistsin Rome in 1959.19There, again in a rewritingof the master-slavedialectic, he distinguishesthree phases forthe renewal of nationalcultures. The firstoccurs when the nativeintellectual assim- ilates the culture of the colonialistpower; the second when this intellectualis called back, as it were, to native traditions,which, however, socially separated as he or she is, tend to be treatedexotically, as so many"mummified fragments" of a folklorishpast; and finallythe third phase when this intellectual,now a participantin a popular struggle,helps to forgea new nationalidentity in active resistance to the colonialist power and in contemporaryrecoding of native traditions.Here too the question is one of correctdistance, but it is reversed, now asked by the other: how to negotiatea distancenot onlyfrom the colonialist power but also from the nativistpast, how to renew a national culture that is neitherneocolonial nor auto-primitivist?20

17. L6vi-Strauss,Tristes Tropiques, pp. 37-44. 18. In other words, "correctdistance" is potentiallya primitivistideologeme as well. It might imply an evolutionistmapping, residual from nineteenth-centuryracialism, of time onto space, whereby "back then" becomes conflatedwith "over there," with the most remote marked as the most primitive.This mapping is not only racist(this site is always"dark") but also absurd, especially at a time of the multinationalimplosion of metropolitancore and imperial periphery.And yet it remains tenacious because it is fundamentalto conceptionsof history-as-developmentand civiliza- tion-as-hierarchy.The now-classicdiscussion of this space-timemapping is Johannes Fabian, Time and theOther: How AnthropologyMakes Its Object(New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1983). 19. In The Wretchedof the Earth (1961), trans.Constance Farigan (New York: Grove Press, 1968), pp. 206-48. In Black Skin, WhiteFaces (1952) Fanon had already developed the mirrorstage in termsof imagoes of the black body. 20. In his conclusion to The Wretchedof the Earth Fanon notes "the obscene narcissism"of Europe and invokes a differentdeath of the subject: "Let us leave Europe where they are never done talkingof Man" (pp. 313, 311). At the same timehe was aware of the dangers not onlyof neocolonial Postmodernismin Parallax 15

What has happened to this problematicof distance today? To call our world postcolonial is to mask the persistenceof colonial and neocolonial relations; it is also to ignore the fact thatjust as there was always a FirstWorld in everyThird World there was alwaysa Third World in everyFirst World.21 And yet the recognitionof this lack of distance may be termed postcolonial,indeed postmodern,at least to the degree that the modern world was oftenthought in terms of spatial oppositions not only between culture and nature, city and country,but also between metropolitancore and imperial periphery,the West and the Rest. Today, at least in economies retooled as post-Fordist,these poles do not orient much, these spaces have imploded somewhat- which is not to say that such power hierarchies have collapsed (it is more a matter of "the British Empire [replaced] by the InternationalMonetary Fund").22 However, for my analysis the question is: how are these worldlyshifts registered, recon- structed, and/or anticipated, in recent theory? Is it too obvious to say that Derridean deconstructionis pledged to the very undoing of such oppositions as theyinform Western thought, that Foucauldean methodologyis founded in the very refusal of such foundations?Is not poststructuralisma criticalelabo- ration of these events of the postcolonial, the postmodern (especially in its concern with"the event")? Or does it also serve as a ruse by which these events are epistemologicallydefused? In the modern world the other confrontedin the course of empire, pro- voked a crisis in cultural identitywhich the avant-gardeattempted to resolve through the symbolicconstruct of primitivism,the fetishisticrecognition-and- disavowal of this otherness.But this resolutionwas also a repression: managed by the moderns, the other has returned at the very moment of its supposed eclipse; indeed, this returnhas become thepostmodern event. In this sense the putative incorporation of the outside in The New World Order may have impelled its eruption into the field of the same as difference.This is what poststructuralismthinks, between the lines as it were,as when Derrida proclaims the end of any "original or transcendentalsignified . .. outside a systemof differences."23And yet the poststructuralistsrarely attended to this other by its many names: theyfailed to answer the Fanonian demand for recognitionin its

recuperationbut also of triumphalseparatism--which led him to critiquethe Negritude movement. For a contemporaneous European response to this same problematicsee Paul Ricoeur, "Universal Civilizationand National Cultures" (1961), in Historyand Truth,trans. Charles Kelbley (Evanston: NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1965). 21. An imbricationexplored in the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha. 22. Jameson, "Periodizing the 60s," p. 184. Such spatial oppositions (e.g., sites of industrial production and places of raw materialsand cheap labor) are not canceled. On the contrary,they are only complicated-revealed to be imbrications,never oppositions. How many other such oppositions have undergone a worldlydeconstruction of late? 23. Derrida, Writingand Difference,p. 280. 16 OCTOBER

own terms. Too often they continued to project the other as an outside, as a space of ideological escape. Thus all the epistemologicalexoticisms-neo- orientalistoases and neo-primitivistresorts-that appear in the poststructuralist landscape: the Chinese scriptin Derrida that"interrupts" Western logocentrism, the Chinese encyclopedia in Foucault that confounds the Western order of things,the Chinese women that lure Kristevawith alternativeidentifications, the Japan of Barthes that represents"the possibilityof a difference,of a mu- tation,of a revolutionin the proprietyof symbolicsystems,"24 the other space of nomadism that for Deleuze and Guattaricuts across capitalistterritoriality, the other society of symbolicexchange that for Baudrillard haunts our own order of commodityexchange, and so on. And yet if poststructuralismcould not finda correctdistance either,at least it problematizedthe attemptto think differenceas opposition, to oppose inside to outside, subject to other. This critique is extended in much postcolonialdiscourse (as it is in much gay and lesbian studies),and it is there that poststructuralismis most productivetoday. In thisregard I can only disagree withthe trashingof poststructuralismand/or postmodernismas just another proper name of the West.

I must break this line here in order to turn to my last track to the postmodern, the impact of technologyon Westernculture as thought in the mid-1930s,the mid-1960s,and the present.Here too I will argue that,even as one discursivemoment leads to the next,this next comprehends the one before. Thus what Guy Debord defines in the spectacle of the mid-1960s are the technologicaltransformations that Walter Benjamin described thirtyyears be- forein the mid-1930s;and whatcyberpunk writers extrapolate in the mid-1990s are the cyberneticextensions that Marshall McLuhan described thirtyyears before in the mid-1960s. In discourseon technologythe termsattached to these momentsare both ideological and accurate: the age of mechanicalreproduction in the 1930s, the age of cyberneticrevolution in the 1960s,25and the age of technoscienceand/or technoculturetoday - i.e., when research and development, culture and technology,cannot be separated even heuristically.The at- tendant narrativesare also both suspect and telling: e.g., the notion that we

24. TheEmpire of Signs (1970), trans.Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), pp. 3-4. The texts to which I allude here are Of Grammatology,The Orderof Things,Chinese Women, Anti- Oedipus,and L'Echangesymbolique et la mort. 25. With myfocus on the (deferred)diachronic, I have not attended to synchroniclinks between differentdiscourses. What are the possible relays,for example, betweenthe structuralismof L6vi- Strauss,the cyberneticsof NorbertWeiner (whom L6vi-Straussoccasionally cites), and the mediatic explosion of the postwarperiod? Postmodernismin Parallax 17

have now passed from an industrialor Fordist society to a postindustrialor post-Fordistone. For I agree with Mandel that the postindustrialsignals not the supercession of industrializationbut its full extension,just as I agree with Jameson that the postmodernannounces not the end of modernizationbut its apparent apogee. Here, however,I want to staywith the ideologeme of distance raised in discourse on the culturalother, for it is also a crucial termin discourse on technology. Benjamin writes"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc- tion" at a momentwhen mechanicalreproduction had alreadybecome a cultural dominant.26There, of course, he argues that such reproduction withersthe aura of art, i.e., its uniqueness, authenticity,authority, distance, and that this withering"emancipates" art fromits ritualisticbases, "bringsthings 'closer"' to the masses.27For Benjamin thiseclipse of distancehas greatliberatory potential, as culture might be made more collective.But it also has great manipulative potential, as politics might be made more spectacular. Socialism or fascism? Benjamin asks in the mostdramatic of modernistultimatums. Yet even by 1936 this alternativecould not hold - that is, if one takes the socialistreferent to be the Soviet Union of Stalin (who was about to sign his pact with Hitler). In this primaryinstance the aestheticizationof politicshad already overwhelmed the politicizationof art. Eight yearslater, in Dialecticof Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer would trace a continuumfrom the total culture of Nazi Ger- many to the culture industryof the United States, and an additional twenty- three years later, in Societyof theSpectacle (1967), Debord would argue that the spectacle dominated the consumeristWest. (In 1988, in Commentson theSociety of theSpectacle, published a year before the recent revolutions,he pronounced the spectacle integratedWest and East.) In Benjamin the witheringof aura, the loss of distance, impacts on the body as well as on the image: the two cannot be separated. At one point he makes an analogy between a painter and a magician on the one hand, and a cameraman and a surgeon on the other: whereas the firsttwo maintain a "natural distance" fromthe motifto paint or the body to heal, the second two "penetrate deeply into its web.'"28The new visual technologiesare thus "surgi-

26. Indeed, given that radio was pervasive,sound filmhad arrived,and televisionwas conceived, it was already somewhat archaic as a term (another reason to substitute"technical reproducibility" in the translationof the title?).Jonathan Crary discusses some of these transformationsin "Spectacle, Attention,Counter-Memory," October 50 (Fall 1989). 27. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations,ed. Hannah Arendt,trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 223-24. In what waysis thiswithering enacted and/or recouped, in deferred action, in the poststructuralistdeath of the author and the postmodern culture of the simulacrum? 28. Ibid., p. 233. For importantelaborations of these analogies see Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,"' New GermanCritique 40 (Winter 1987), and Susan Buck-Morss,"Aesthetics and Anaesthetics." 18 OCTOBER

cal": theyreveal the world in new representations,shock the observerinto new perceptions. For Benjamin this "optical unconscious" renders us both more criticaland more distracted(such is his great hope for cinema), and he insists on this paradox as a dialectic. But here too it is not clear that it could be maintained. Already in 1931 Ernst Jfingerhad argued that technologywas "intertwinedwith our nerves"in a way thatsubsumed criticalityand distraction within"a second, colder consciousness."" And not much later, in 1947, Hei- degger announced that distance and closeness were folded into "a uniformity in which everythingis neitherfar nor near."'30 Certainlyby the mid-1960s the Benjaminian dialecticsplits in such signal discourses on technologyas Debord on spectacle and McLuhan on media. Implicitly,whereas Debord develops Benjamin on the image, McLuhan elabo- rates Benjamin on the body; however,both regard criticaldistance as all but doomed. For Debord spectacle subsumescriticality under distraction,31and the dialectic of distance and closeness becomes an opposition of social separations concealed by imaginaryunities (e.g., images of product-bliss,universal middle- classness, nationalistcollectivity). On the one hand, external distance is elimi- nated in spectacle; on the other hand, it is reproduced as internaldistance, the distance of spectacularfantasy. It is thissubjectivist distance (which is reallyno distance at all) that underwritesthe social separations. Out of similar symptomsMcLuhan makes a differentdiagnosis. As in Debordian spectacle so in his "global village": distance,spatial as well as critical, is eclipsed. But rather than separation McLuhan sees "retribalization,"and ratherthan criticalitylost he sees distractiontransvalued.32 Apparently oblivious to Benjamin, McLuhan develops related ideas, often only to invertthem. For McLuhan new technologiesdo not penetratethe body "surgically,"as theydo for Benjamin, so much as theyextend it "electrically."Yet like Benjamin he sees in this process a double movement:technology is an excessivestimulus even as it is also a protectiveshield against such stimulus,against such shock- the first (the stimulus,the shock) convertedby the body into the second (the shield).33 This parryingof shock is crucial to the Benjaminian dialecticof criticalityand

29. ErnstJuinger, "Photography and the 'Second Consciousness,"' in ChristopherPhillips, ed., Photographyin theModern Era (New York: MetropolitanMuseum, 1989), p. 207 30. MartinHeidegger, "The Thing," Poetry,Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 165-66. 31. In factDebord invokesnot the Benjaminian notionof "distraction"but ratherthe Lukacsian concept of "contemplation"used in Historyand Class Consciousness(1923) to think the subjective effectsof capitalistmass production. 32. There is a strongprimitivist turn in McLuhan, especiallywhen tropesof commonality,indeed commingling,are required-and thisat a time of revolutionin the Third World. 33. Freud develops the model of the protectiveshield in Beyondthe Pleasure Principle (1920), and alludes to it in relationto the ego in Civilizationand Its Discontents(1930). The psychicdimension of this model, however,is elided in McLuhan even more radicallythan in Benjamin. Postmodernismin Parallax 19

distraction. But in McLuhan it flies apart into an opposition impossible to reconcile. "We have put our central nervous systemsoutside us in electric technology,"he writesmore than once. Yet sometimeshe sees thisextension as an ecstaticbody become electric,absolutely connected to the world, and sometimes as a "suicidal auto-amputation,as if the central nervous systemcould no longer depend on the physicalorgans to be protectivebuffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism."34 Today such dis/connectionis even more extreme. Is our mediatic world one of increased interaction,as benign as the cyberspaceof a telephone call or a databank; or is it one of invasive discipline,each of us so many "dividuals" electronicallytracked, genetically traced, not as a policy of any maleficentBig Brother but as a matterof quotidian course? In so many ways it is both these worlds at once, and it is thisnew intensityof dis/connectionthat is postmodern. Again, as of yet I can only develop this postmoderndis/connection anecdotally,and with this I will conclude. In the last few years, with the sacrificed students in Beijing and the fallen Wall in Berlin, the murderous war in the Persian Gulf and the madcap coup in the Soviet Union, I have come to feel wired to spectacular events. Like the mental patientin Gravity'sRainbow whose hystericalfevers mount withthe destructiveforces of World War II, my spirit seems to rise and fall with these events, and I do not think I am alone. This electrochemicalwiring connects and disconnectsus simultaneously:we are both psychotechnologicallyimmediate to eventsand geopoliticallyremote from them. Such dis/connectionis not new (thinkof the Kennedy assassination,the Munich Terror Games, the Lennon assassination,the Challenger explosion), but it has reached a new level of oxymoronicpain-and-pleasure. Such for me was the real CNN Effect of the Gulf War: repelled by the politics, I was riveted by the images,by a psycho-techno-thrillthat locked me in, as smartbomb and spectator are locked in as one. A thrillof technomastery(my mere human perception become a super machine vision,able to see what it destroysand to destroywhat it sees),35but also a thrillof an imaginarydispersal of myown body, of my own subjecthood. Of course, when the screens of the smart bombs went dark, my body did not explode. In fact,it was bolstered: in a classic fascistictrope, my

34. Marshall McLuhan, UnderstandingMedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 60, 53. Note the differenttropics of the body. In Benjamin the formal body remains central as object of technologicalprosthesis and as figureof the body politic. In McLuhan it is displaced as a trope by the nervous system:the social is seen as a network,not as a body. In much contemporarydiscourse the body, the social, has lost even this figuralintegrity. Consider too the differentvaluations given the media. Benjamin considers the problem of reproductionfor values of art. For McLuhan (let alone Debord) art is no longer at issue, and the reproduced image is replaced by the metastatic media. And today the strange McLuhan thesis,"the contentof the medium is another medium," has become the everydaycyberpunk slogan, "computersmelted other machines." 35. On machine vision see Paul Virilio,War and Cinema,trans. PatrickCamiller (London: Verso, 1989). 20 OCTOBER

body, my subjecthood, was affirmedin the destructionof other bodies. And again, I do not thinkI was alone in thisawful affirmation. These are but a few of the splittingsof the subject that occur witha new postmodern intensitytoday: a spatiotemporalsplitting, the paradox of great immediacyproduced through extraordinarymediation; a moral splitting,the paradox of disgustundercut by fascination,or of sympathyundercut by sadism; and a splittingat the level of body-image,the ecstasyof imaginarydispersal rescued by the confirmationof ego armor. To me the postmodernsubject is constructed in such splittings.Is it any wonder that this subject is often so dysfunctional?Is it any wonder thatwhen it is able to functionit oftendoes so on automatic,given over to fetishisticresponses, to partial recognitionssynco- pated with complete disavowals? (I know about AIDS, but I cannot get it; I know racists,but I am not one; I know what The New World Order is, but my paranoia embraces it anyway... ) It has become common to referto such recognition-cum-disavowalas cynical reason, a state in which agency is not so much canceled as it is relinquished- as if agency were a small price to pay for the shield that such cynicismmight provide, the immunitythat such ambivalence might secure.36 Yet these radical splittingsneed not render one politicallyautistic. Consider how difficultit was for heterosexualmen to come to termswith sexual harass- mentduring the Clarence Thomas hearings,or formiddle-class whites to admit to the factof judicial racismafter the Rodney King verdict,but manydid. These are momentsof traumaticdivision, to be sure,but as such theyare also moments when impossibleidentifications become possible.

36. See Peter Sloterdijk,Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).