After two decades of pomo talk, postmodern remains a very slippery term. About as slippery as "proletarian literature" in the 1930s, or the word "aesthetic" in the 1890s. However, with the turn of the millennium, it will probably grow less slippery with time. Why? Because the nerve centers of the dot com universe are whispering that pomo's fifteen minutes of fame are up and that postmodernism is officially over. Now if the corpse will only lie still, the coroner can get to work.

First flash of the scalpel: the postmodern was born, developed, and died in precisely the same way as the modern. It is the modern's inescapable 'other'. Similarly, the end of Dada as a vital movement in art occurred with the demise of its 'other'. I refer to the deletion of etiquette from the collective brain of advanced capitalist society sometime in the early 1960s. Postmodernism's co-presence with modernism can be seen when we realize that it was postmodernism to which Baudelaire was referring when he couldn't tell whether his reader was his brother (mon frère) or himself (mon semblable). If the X Files documents a shadowy parallel universe of unexplained events, postmodernism is modernism's X file. So with the death of modernism, its X dossier is now closed. In the new century ahead we will need to get past this nomenclature of an ultimately self-cancelling co-presence.

But about the death of the postmodern, my sources do say, however, that it has only died in New York City, and I suppose if you live in Manhattan and have watched and heard the discourse of postmodernism trickle down from the heights of the Trump Tower to the crack dealers on Amsterdam Avenue, then you are no doubt weary of pomo talk. But news travels slowly, even in hyperspace, so here in the provinces we have a good three to five years of pomo's fifteen minutes of fame remaining, except in the little strips of youth hipdom that can be found in even the most clodhopper towns. Howevermuch that most postmodern weapon, the Uzi submachinegun may have solved the problem of the metaphysics of presence in the South Bronx, the question of defining postmodernism, for us, still remains, even at this late date, a slippery business.

Does postmodernism, for example, represent a radical break with the old notion of modern times, or is it simply a revolt within the modernist aesthetic against certain forms of "high modernism" as represented, say, by the poetry of T. S. Eliot, or the architecture of Mies van der Rohe or the blank surfaces of minimalist abstract expressionist painting (Mark Rothko)? Is postmodernism a philosophical style, via Dada and Surrealism, with roots in Nietzsche's debunking of classic humanism, or should we view it strictly as a periodizing concept, say, as a stylistic reaction to Bauhaus functionalism, beginning possibly in the 1950s in Las Vegas? Is there beyond the arts a postmodern politics and is Bill Clinton its magus? Does postmodern politics have serious transformative (we used to say revolutionary) potential by virtue of its opposition to all metanarratives of control (including all forms of Enlightenment reason, Marxism, Freudianism, etc.), and is it revolutionary by its close attention to "other worlds" and to "other voices" that have been long silenced (women, gays, blacks, colonized peoples, all of whom, as we've come to understand, have their own histories and their own realities and now their own shopping centers to consume in)? Or is it simply the commercialization and domestication of modernity and the now familiar aspirations of a laissez-faire, "anything goes" market eclecticism in which the human agent is repositioned in history, not as "Man", the measure of all things, or the liberal variant of this, the individual as citoyen, the rational, informed citizen, but as a utility maximiser on a cell phone? Does postmodernism, therefore, undermine or integrate with neo-conservative politics? And are we to attach its rise to some radical restructuring of capitalism, the emergence of some "postindustrial" society, in which the capitalist mode of production shifts from older, more rigid forms of capital accumulation (for which the term Fordist - after Henry Ford - is normally used) to more flexible, less centralized, more mobile ones, and is thus more thoroughly exploitative and more impregnably invincible? Do we view postmodern art, as the "art of an inflationary era" or as the "cultural logic of late capitalism"?

The most startling fact about postmodernism is not, it seems to me, its acceptance of the ephemeral, the fragmentary, and the discontinuous. We might recognize this as one-half of Charles Baudelaire's conception of modernity and of the ephemeral as the necessary condition for an authentic heroism in modern times. (The other half of Baudelaire is the traditional idea of transcendence and the ideal as the final destination of fashion's exhausted refugees.) But postmodernism responds to the ephemeral, not by aiming to transcend it (which is a high modernist theme), but by embracing it without reservation. Postmodernism does not discover in the ephemeral the eternal and immutable elements, reflections of the ideal within appearance, that carry the potential to unify and staunch the ceaseless flow of change. To the degree that it does try to legitimate itself by reference to the past, postmodernism typically looks to those, like Nietzsche for example, who emphasize the deep chaos of modern life and its intractability before rational thought. Embracing the fragmentary and ephemeral in an affirmative fashion leads to a number of consequences.

To begin with, we find writers like Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard explicitly attacking any notion that there might be a metalanguage, metanarrative, or metatheory through which all things can be connected and represented. Universal or eternal truths, if they exist at all, cannot be specified. Condemning metanarratives - those broad interpretative and explanatory schemes like those constructed by Plato, Aquinas, Marx or Freud - as "totalizing," Foucault for example insists upon the absolute plurality of discourses as running dead against the sway of explanatory totalities. This discursive diversity resists what he calls, rather strikingly, "the fascism in our heads" by building upon the open and ungovernable qualities of human discourse and, thereby, disrupting the way knowledge is routinely produced and constituted at the particular sites where some "iron cage" of repression, some bureaucratic-technical power-discourse prevails. Lyotard, more preoccupied with language as such, speaks of "language games", again in the plural, as the ruptured landscape which the classic totalizations cannot map, language as the medium not of one Logos, but of a multitude of logoi. While "the social bond is linguistic," he argues, it "is not woven with a single thread" but by an "indeterminate number" of "language games." Each of us lives "at the intersection of many of these" and we do not necessarily establish "stable language combinations and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable." As a result, "the social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of language games." The traditional metanarratives which synthesize and unify language-knowledge-experience cannot be re-assembled when we've reached this degree of dispersal and separation.

We don't realize perhaps well enough what a tremendous investment Western society has made in these metanarratives and how much they always enter into the events of the classroom or lecture theater. The dissolution of these traditional metanarratives, I believe, is where the greatest challenge to the teacher in the humanities lies today.

Well, there is plenty here to keep the coroner's blades flashing for longer than my little space of time allows. So let me rotate this large subject so that we might look at it more closely from our perspective, as teachers of language and literature. What does postmodernism mean for us?

The one account of the postmodern condition that seems most relevant to a discussion of pedagogy and the university as presently constituted is, I believe, Lyotard's deployment of the term in his important summary statement on the state of knowledge, "in the most highly developed societies", for the Government of Quebec in the late 1970s, the report called La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge).

First let's note that the term "condition" is an interesting rhetorical move. Are we in the terrain of the pathological here? We should be wary of this because we know that it has been one of Foucault's aims to question the traditional distinction between the normal and the pathological. Is it a "condition" in the medical sense, then, that is being dissected? Or is the term meant to suggest logical enquiry, of the sort familiar in Anglo-American philosophy, i.e., an attempt to establish the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for something called the postmodern to exist? The condition he diagnoses as characterizing the state of knowledge in the late 20th century is one of extreme scepticism towards the great legitimizing discourses inherited from the past. "I define postmodern," he writes, "as incredulity toward metanarratives." Postmodern here denotes those transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century (and more fully now than ever before), have altered the rules of the game for science, literature, and the arts. He means by metanarratives those grand narratives which legitimize, which warrant, the theory and practice of particular disciplines. Science for example does not simply restrict itself to finding and stating useful regularities in nature and blithely seeking the truth, it is obliged to legitimate the rules of its own game. It then produces a discourse of legitimation with respect to its own status. In the case of science this metadiscourse is a form of positivist philosophy.

Lyotard uses the term modern (as opposed to postmodern) to designate any discipline that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind. In the humanities we can list some of these Grand Disciplinary Narratives easily enough:

• the prevailing humanism which has provided the most authoritative framing discourse of Western culture since the sixteenth century;
• the cult of personal identity, and of the metaphysical construction of subjectivity;
• the hermeneutics of meaning and the establishment of a particular, well-policed standard of intelligibility;
• the primacy of Spirit in the spirit/matter couple;
• reason as the foundation of human freedom;
• beauty as the goal of artistic activity;
• equilibrium as the vanishing point of civil and economic life, and so on.

These metanarratives of control can be heard whirring routinely in the background of a hundred lectures any day of the week around the campus.

The postmodern is defined then as incredulity towards these metanarratives. The postmodern condition refers to that state of dismay and crisis in which the legitimating warrants, the underlying rules and framework of our game, have dissolved. Leading us, some might feel, if we don't just simply ignore the whole matter, to the precipice of nihilism and dread. But we might want to see the dissolution of these control mechanisms of thought and feeling in other terms, as leading, for example, to joy rather than dread, in recognizing here a possibly final and complete liberation.

Which brings me to teaching.

If what Lyotard proposes is true and there is a good deal of evidence to suggest we are living through just such a crisis, although I'm not sure that there aren't, at the same time, some very powerful arguments to suggest that he's wrong, but let's assume that his diagnosis reflects accurately the actual conditions in which we do our work, in which we try to establish, if not the final truth of our statements, at least their plausibilities, how do we then approach our work in the classroom? How do we teach writing students, for example, about finding a personal "voice" if the old certainty about the unity and substance of personal identity is no longer possible and can no longer legitimate the category of "voice", or that the romantic metanarrative of art as self-expression, resulting in poetry, for example, which can be confidently referred to the particulars of a personal history and to an individual temperament and sensibility, is no longer there even as a sustaining and necessary fiction, what do we do then with the task of teaching? And what about the pieties paid to the nobility of the human spirit in a century which has seen the nihilistic destruction of so many millions of human bodies? And how does the naive faith in the perfectibility of the human person survive Bergen-Belsen and the "highway from hell" north of Kuwait City? When the traditional metanarratives ring hollow, where does the legitimating discourse dwell?

As a teacher you have a particularly difficult task because you inevitably find yourself in the position of making explicit these traditional metanarratives as reference points in interpretation, in analysis and discussion of a work's vision of the real and of the human enterprise, and very often you find yourself seeming to accept or even defend them by virtue of the fact that you've made them explicit. Can you talk confidently about Hamlet as "touching on the perennial issues of human nature" (as I heard recently in an undergraduate lecture), when the term "human nature" itself may be gibberish, may be simply an empty signifier to be filled in eccentrically by the authority figure at the lectern, useful perhaps for ideological purposes, for re-inforcing some group's claim to power, or cultural hegemony, and appealed to, not as the final solution to a real problem, but as a way of cutting short further, and possibly more subversive, enquiry? In bringing our attention to the underlying warrants, and the backing for these warrants, upon which our discourses rest, postmodernism has rendered us a great service, a service of liberation. This is cause for joy. But as you might suspect a condition of permanent reflexiveness presents particular problems for the teacher and scholar, whose position at the heart of the production and transmission of knowledge carries with it a traditional, and often jealously guarded, priestly authority. Let me give you a personal example of the kind of problem the teacher of literature can face under the conditions sketched to this point.

I've spent the last fifteen years studying the work of T.S. Eliot and I'm now well into a second book on his work, and I've taught The Waste Land many times over that period. It really is an impossible poem, a difficult poem. I don't find it difficult because of its erudition or its non-linear development by juxtaposition without connectives, or because of its reliance on uncontextualized images to convey its primary effects, nor do I find it difficult because I can't come up with a convincing account of its "meaning" - no, those aren't my problems with the poem at all. My problem with The Waste Land stems from the fact that convincing accounts of its coherence, and therefore its meaning, can spring so easily to my lips. My difficulty lies in the fact that I can now effortlessly and convincingly transpose the entire poem to a metadiscursive register which makes sense of its text. Any small doubts arising from the intractability or uncooperativeness of specific details in the poem I can simply and glibly dismiss, if I'm so minded. Not only do I command the lectern, I've also got that intimidating fifteen years of professional study under my belt.

Typically the poem's discontinuous, fragmentary surface may be resolved by reference to vegetation myths of Indoeuropean origin, that the seeming chaos of modern times, when one stands far enough back from it, clearly reveals underlying unifying patterns of ancient myth. These myths are both social institutions, in the sense that they constitute society at some deeper level of communal or collective consciousness, and they provide access to the deeper recesses of individual consciousness. They make order happen, in a poem that works through what seems an irredeemably disordered and disordering discourse. These appeals to Indoeuropean myths or the metaphysics of subjectivity and consciousness as unifying metanarratives, then, can make the poem cohere, even against itself. You might call this metanarrative the myth of myth-as-unifying principle.

But let me make a confession to you, the same one I sometimes make to my students: my intuition tells me the poem itself resists unified interpretation at every turn. If truth be told, I've come to suspect that most accounts of the poem's internal coherence are really anxiety-ridden attempts to salvage the wreckage of a devastated lucidity, not only in the poem itself, where the traditional lucidities of romantic aesthetics are ceaselessly challenged and subverted, but also to salvage lucidity as such, in a more general sense, as a sustaining structure of Western expressiveness. It seems to me that Eliot's challenges to romanticism carry us out past aesthetic consciousness to a more radical questioning of certain epistemological givens in Western thought. I don't think Eliot intended such a penetrating and radical critique, but the pressures of the historical moment of composition and Eliot's own psychological and emotional state at the time forced such a critique out of him, carried him well past his own, more limited, goals, such as they were.

What my struggles with the poem have made me conscious of is not the difficulty of making sense of Eliot's text, but of the pathological need to believe in and maintain the myth of clarity as a central given of Western concepts of communication. I don't think I need to sketch a defense of lucidity for you; we all know, supposedly, its value in our guts. You don't need to hear an argument in defense of the lucid, because that defense is already built into the operating metanarrative of expressiveness in our culture. You might liken it to a default setting of the mind, not as a metaphysical given, but as socially constructed for particular purposes. Postmodernism is simply fiddling with the default settings.

We might interrogate the sanctity of normative syntax, for example, in the same vein. Gertrude Stein's stretching of the syntactic norms of language force us to recognize that the conventionally close, but arbitrary, association of a normative syntax and meaning, gives way to new forms of semantic circulation in a text, semantic processes that go well beyond even Eliot's subversion of the foundations of a certain kind of inherited intelligibility.

But push further. Take "clarity" as part of the mandate to be intelligible in our culture. Think of it as a political demand, our demand of writing students that they be clear in thought and expression, that they make their thought as clear to us as possible. Let me ask you a difficult question: why should they trust our privileging of clarity? What if we have some other motive, other than our usual appeal to the wisdom of effective communication (for success in life), some other design not necessarily in the students's own interest, in urging the students to be clear? What if that motive is so thoroughly disguised in the rhetoric of a generous and optimistic, yet fraudulent, liberalism, so well hidden from view (and therefore so much more effective) that we teachers aren't even aware that it exists as the real destination of all our instruction in clarity? Why should clarity be the principal aim of effective expression? In a totalitarian society teaching people to be clear could be seen as collaboration with the regime, couldn't it? In some cultures, think of Nazi German, being opaque and impenetrable is really the only way to survive, being clear might mean revealing too much. And really we don't have to remember Nazi Germany to recognize that the demand to be clear might even be a form of surveillance right here in our own classrooms. The old rationale runs like this: the path to freedom lies in the open and lucid operation of reason made visible in clear expression. Only the clear thinker satisfies the requirements of the logos. Or so that particular metanarrative goes and one can call on a long philosophical and rhetorical tradition to support it. Here lies one of the most powerful myths of Western thought. But what if we see things otherwise: coherence, lucidity, clarity may have no universal warrant in the history of what we mean by effective writing; they may simply be tactics, essentially political in origin and effect, to make the subalterns transparent to their masters, in order to more effectively maintain surveillance of them from the vantage of a power-discourse, a discourse that constitutes us as pedagogues, and puts us and "clarity" in the service of the status quo. The more clear the dominated are in expressing themselves, the more easily we can look into their minds, the more easily we can police their very souls; the more we go on about souls and the eternal human spirit, the more resigned they become to their inescapable fates, and isn't it curious how often the inescapable fates of so many of our students, or of colonized peoples, for that matter, is servitude, not freedom.

The question of the political status of "clarity" is, as you might agree, an interesting case, although it is also a provocative one. I offer it as an example of a certain kind of postmodern interrogation of what is, in the practicalities of teaching language and literature, a universally acknowledged truth.

Well I didn't mean to depress you. I did begin with joy a moment ago and have ended, I fear, somewhere near despair. The challenges of postmodernism as we find it in the works of Lyotard and Foucault represent a challenge particularly to the teacher. As I mentioned earlier Lyotard's diagnosis of the postmodern condition in knowledge is not itself beyond challenge. Both Lyotard and Foucault, however, have made very powerful critiques of certain unifying, totalizing predispositions in Western thought. No more so than in their displacement of the human from a position of privilege in the thought of the West. Foucault's conclusion to The Order of Things unabashedly announces the decentering of the human subject: "One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area - European culture since the sixteenth century - one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it. . . . As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end" (386-387). This departure from the main path of Western philosophy, a turning which takes its first modern formulation in Nietzsche on its way to Foucault, jars us when heard against the reigning humanism in all its numberless choruses. One is tempted to respond with a "so what?" After all, do Foucault, Lyotard, and others really represent a serious challenge to the workings of a humanism which is so thoroughly ingrained in the intellectual and moral tradition of the West that it cannot be shaken from the official rhetoric of the American empire even as 100,000 charred bodies pile up grotesquely in the desert north of Kuwait City? Where do we locate Man (with a capital M), as the measure of all things, among the nameless charred remains in southern Iraq. Man? Is it just one more public relations triumph for civilization?

There is an argument that can be made which suggests that the best thing to do as a teacher is ignore the crisis, if that is what it is, proceed in the framework of the old in order to give students something to hold on to - after they have assimilated the old legitimizing discourses with their value systems, standards of intelligibility and coherence, the production of authority, the policing of boundaries etc., after all that, then open the debate on the question of the legitimacy of the metanarratives of control, only then is someone really in a position to understand, appreciate, the implications of the postmodern condition.

I'm not sure our students can't already see through such a tactic. I suspect that many of them find life in the postmodern lane far more comfortable than we do, after all they've always shopped in the malls with their decentered design, their multiple, ungrounded discourses of pleasure and instant gratification, their playful, self-parodying invitations to decipher today's consumption codes, their absent owners, exercising control remotely through franchise and chainstore, and finally their transformation of the event of exchange from a transaction constituted by two willing, rational human beings, into a structure which constitutes, sometimes ironically, a knowing, half-humorous parody of the human through the act of consumption itself. Plato's Republic cannot long survive these pastel parodies of utopia.

But there other arguments that can be deployed, that are just as convincing, arguments that suggest that assuming the undeniable truth of the old grand narratives, about a unified human nature, history as the record of human liberation, progress, et cetera simply transmits blindly to students, often below conscious awareness, the whole hollow edifice of the past, with its glaring contradictions, wishful thinking, semi-conscious self-deceptions, its hidden exercises of power, its police actions masquerading as the maintainance of civilized or humane or progressive values, and so on: the argument goes on to propose, that in the postmodern condition, a new kind of pedagogy must be born, that not only recognizes the postmodern condition as such, but inserts the very act of teaching itself, with all its hidden assumptions about knowledge, power, and value into the teaching process as well.

I only have a few minutes left and so must leave you, I'm sorry to say, with these enormous questions unanswered. But let me give this large subject one more turn, and let me toy for a moment with what might sound like self-contradiction. The very existence of the postmodern condition as described by Lyotard is itself still an open question. And the possibility exists that he is both right and wrong, that, yes, there is a delegitimizing process in progress and we are in the midst of it, very much like the process of economic and statutory deregulation that is transforming the civil societies of the North Atlantic world by deliberately dissolving the old regulatory mechanisms of social and economic life (the political and economic metanarratives of our grandparents) for the "freedom" offered by the new disciplines of the marketplace, which is now positioned, supposedly, as a more natural form of regulation. The mention of the word natural, of course, should alert us to the fact that we're sailing awfully close to a condition where the natural is used to mask something that is constructed socially through and through. And, if we transpose Lyotard's scheme, we can see that the concept of the market, which constitutes the most powerful socio-economic metanarrative of our day, dissolves the old discourses of value, regulation, and control, thus casting customary societies, not just knowledge, into the postmodern condition.

We only have to look around us in the public sphere to see the effect of the delegitimizing of old value systems. We do not even have to invent "a postmodern condition" in order to isolate the cause. Market capitalism erodes systematically, without any help thank you very much from the professors at the Ecole Normale Superior, the old metanarratives of control. We are witness to this in the everyday, not in the special semiosphere of the theory seminar. We see it in the organization of work under the pressure of the world market, in the commercialization of the family, in the disruption of the traditional life of communities by "development", and most strikingly, in the political defeat of humanism by the remaking of the State as material and ideological defender of the new commercial religion, the primacy of "market forces" to reorganize not only material life, but consciousness itself, according to what best maintains competitive production. We work, we organize our family life, we remake consciousness in order to maintain the efficient circulation of goods and credit, all the rest, as the saying goes, is frills. Where is the classical conception of Man (with a capital M) in this situation? Precisely nowhere. Individuals come and go, but the free play of market forces goes on forever.

From this wider, and I hope more useful, perspective the postmodern condition is not simply some philosophical debate in Paris or a series of stylistic gyrations in Manhattan or Milan. The postmodern condition, insofar as postmodernism refers to the process of delegitimizing privileged discourses of value which sustain established societies, is everywhere around us. Is everywhere around us, except in the classroom. The expiration of humanism, for example, envelops us at every turn, again except in the classroom, where quixotically, the teaching of a traditional humanism persists. In politics, in social life, in economics the process of delegitimizing communal values, of respect for the individual, of the value of the arts, of the necessity of self-knowledge, is debunked and ridiculed usually implicitly, but more openly now than ever. Only in the classroom are these values part of a sustaining metanarrative that functions there, among the students, as resistance to and rebuke of the culture of toys and its value system, a value system that begins and ends with that most grimly despairing of postmodern oneliners - who dies with the most toys, wins.

Well so what are we left with? A very ambiguous situation, I fear. Our dilemma is really not one of thought so much as one of action. If postmodernism is liberation, then it represents one of the great and hopeful turning points of human history. But if it is simply the final extension of the power of the market economy over all cultural and intellectual production, then there is plenty of reason to resist and rebuke such developments in our classrooms.

31 May 1991