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Can I borrow this item? In post-war America, it was the Black Mountain poets, and above all Charles Olson, who had recovered its energies. It was the result of a collision of strongly anti-modernist and provincial sensibilities with the hybrid modernism of Pound and the purer modernism of Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams': boundary 2, I, No 1, p.
It was this reception that for the first time stabilized the idea of the postmodern as a collective reference. In the process, however, it underwent an alteration. Olson's call for a projective literature beyond humanism was remembered and honoured. But his political attachment to an unbidden future beyond capitalism -- the other side of Rimbaud's 'courage' saluted in The Kingfishers -- passed out of sight.
Not that boundary 2 was devoid of radical impulse. Its creator, William Spanos, decided to found the journal as a result of his shock at US collusion with the Greek Junta, while a visiting teacher at the University of Athens.
He later explained that 'at that time, "Modern" meant, literally, the Modernist literature that had precipitated the New Criticism and the New Criticism which had defined Modernism in its own autotelic terms'. In Athens he sensed 'a kind of complicity' between this established orthodoxy, in which he had been trained, and the callous officialdom he was witnessing. On returning to America, he conceived boundary 2 as a break with both. At the height of the Vietnam War, his aim was to 'get literature back into the domain of the world', at a time of 'the most dramatic moment of American hegemony and its collapse', and to demonstrate that 'postmodernism is a kind of rejection, an attack, an undermining of the aesthetic formalism and conservative politics of the New Criticism'.
Spanos's own resistance to the Nixon Presidency was not in doubt -- he was locked up for a demonstration against it. But twenty years of Cold War had made the climate unpropitious for a fusion of cultural and political vision: Olson's unity was not retrieved.
After speaking of his arrest in protest against the bombing of Cambodia, Spanos acknowledges that 'I didn't quite associate what I was doing as a citizen with my literary, critical perspective. I don't want to say that they were absolutely distinguished, but I wasn't self-conscious of the connections'.
The result was to inflect Olson's objectivism towards a Heideggerian metaphysics of Being, that in due course became a dominant strand in boundary 2.
The intra-mundane space of the postmodern was thereby -so to speak -- left vacant. It was soon, however, occupied by a lateral entrant. Among early contributors to the journal was Ihab Hassan, a critic who had published his first essay on postmodernism just before it was launched.
An Egyptian by birth -- son of an aristocratic governor between the wars, famous for repression of a nationalist demonstration against British tutelage 3 -- and engineer by training, Hassan's original interest had lain in a high modernism pared to an expressive minimum: what he called a 'literature of silence', passing down from Kafka to Beckett.
When he advanced the notion of postmodernism in , however, Hassan subsumed this descent into a much wider spectrum of tendencies that either radicalized or refused leading traits of modernism: a configuration that extended to the visual arts, music, technology, and sensibility at large.
Within a heterogeneous range, however, a core cluster was discernible. All of these were associated with Black Mountain College. Riots broke out across the country and were met with force. Casualties were particularly heavy at El Mansura. No one counted the wounded. I felt my loyalties torn between my father and his foes. Three years later, Mustafa el Nahas became prime minister of Egypt. My father was forced to resign': Ihab Hassan, Out of Egypt. Scenes and Arguments of an Autobiograpby, Carbondale , pp.
For an anguished eyewitness account of the massacre, seen as an eleven-year-old from a balcony above it, compare the very different memoir of the Egyptian feminist Latifa Zayyat: The Search, London , pp. His place was, as it were, occupied by a fourth figure -- Marshall McLuhan. In this combination, the pivot was clearly Cage: close friend of Rauschenberg and Fuller, and warm admirer of McLuhan.
When Hassan concluded his survey of the motley indices of postmodernism -running from Spaceship Earth to the Global Village, faction and happening, aleatory reduction and parodic extravaganza, impermanence and intermedia -- and sought to synthesize them as so many 'anarchies of the spirit', playfully subverting the aloof verities of modernism, the composer was one of the very few artists who could plausibly be associated with most of the bill.
In subsequent essays, Hassan enlisted Foucault's notion of an epistemic break to suggest comparable shifts in science and philosophy, in the wake of Heisenberg or Nietzsche. In this vein, he argued that the underlying unity of the postmodern lay in 'the play of indeterminacy and immanence', whose originating genius in the arts had been Marcel Duchamp.
The list of his successors included Ashbery, Barth, Barthelme and Pynchon in literature; Rauschenberg, Warhol, Tinguely in the visual arts. By , Hassan had annexed virtually a complete roster of poststructuralist motifs into an elaborate taxonomy of the difference between postmodern and modern paradigms, and expanded his Gotha of practitioners yet further.
Is postmodernism, he asked, 'only an artistic tendency or also a social phenomenon? To these questions, Hassan returned no coherent answer, though making one significant observation.
If the difference was to be explored, it would be difficult to avoid politics. But here Hassan drew back. I admit to a certain ambivalence towards politics, which can overcrowd our responses to both art and life'. Preferable by far, as a philosophy for postmodernity, was 'the bluff tolerance and optative spirit of American pragmatism', above 'all in the expansive, celebratory shape of William James, whose pluralism offered ethical balm for current anxieties. Terms like 'left and right, 16 base and superstructure, production and reproduction, materialism and idealism' had become 'nearly unserviceable, except to perpetuate prejudice'.
This was surely one reason why he withdrew from the field at the end of the eighties. But there was another, internal to his account of the arts themselves. When he started to explore the cultural scene of the seventies, Hassan construed it predominantly through this prism.
The strategic role fell to vanguards traceable back to the matrix of Black Mountain. Warhol could stand as short-hand for this strand. Hassan's original conspectus included it, if without emphasis.
Over time, however, he sensed that this was perhaps the overall direction in which the postmodern was tending. At mid-decade, a design exhibition in the Grand Palais, Styles 85, displaying a vast array of postmodern objects 'from thumbtacks to yachts', led him to a certain revulsion: 'Walking through the bright farrago, hectares of esprit, parody, persiflage, I felt the smile on my lips freeze'.
Caught between ideological truculence and demystifying nugacity, caught in its own kitsch, postmodernism has become a kind of eclectic raillery, the refined prurience of our borrowed pleasures and trivial disbeliefs'. Ironically, it was the art to which he gave least attention that finally projected the term into the public domain at large.
Venturi had already made his name with an elegant critique of the purist orthodoxy of the International Style in the age of Mies, invoking Mannerist, Baroque, Rococo and Edwardian masterpieces as alternative values for contemporary practice. It was time to return to Ruskin's dictum that architecture was the decoration of construction. Delivered with an air of casual learning, the laid-back message of Learning from Las Vegas rested on premises that would have dumbfounded Ruskin.
The morality of commercial advertising, gambling interests, and the competitive instinct is not at issue'. But the architect's principal concern 'ought not to be with ought to be but with what is' and 'how to help improve it'. Contrasting the planned monotony of modernist megastructures with the vigour and heterogeneity of spontaneous urban sprawl, Learning from Las Vegas summed up the dichotomy between them in a phrase: 'Building for Man' vs.
Here, spelt out with beguiling candour, was the new relationship between art and society Hassan surmised but failed to define. Venturi's programme, expressly designed to supersede the modern, still lacked a name. It was not long coming. By the term 'postmodem' -- anticipated a decade earlier by Pevsner, to castigate a weak historicism -- had entered the art world in New York, where perhaps the first architect to use it was Venturi's student Robert Stern.
Much more polemical in his obsequy for modernism -- 18 allegedly consigned to oblivion in , with the the demolition of a high-rise in the Mid-West -- Jencks was at first also more critical than Venturi of American capitalism, and of the collusion between the two in the principal types of post-war building commission. But, while arguing the need for a broader semiotic range than Venturi had allowed, to include iconic as well as symbolic forms, his prescriptions were essentially based on the ideas of Learning from Las Vegas -- inclusive variety, popular legibility, contextual sympathy.
Despite his title, Jencks was initially hesitant about calling these values 'post-modern', since the term was -- he confessed --'evasive, fashionable and worst of all negative'. Within a year Jencks had changed his mind, fully adopting the idea of the postmodern and now theorizing its eclecticism as a style of 'double-coding': that is, an architecture employing a hybrid of modern and historicist syntax, and appealing both to educated taste and popular sensibility.
It was this liberating mixture of new and old, high and low, which defined postmodernism as a movement, and assured it the future. Prompted in part by the work of the Marxist critic Malcolm MacEwan, a colleague of Edward Thompson'hompson on The New Reasoner, at this stage Jencks offered a periodization of modes of architectural production' -- mini-capitalist; welfare state capitalist; monopoly capitalist, or the new, all-pervasive dominance of the commercial developer.
Post-Modernism is trying to get over that elitism', by reaching out 'towards the vernacular, towards tradition and the commercial slang of the street' -- 'architecture, which has been on an enforced diet for fifty years, can only enjoy itself and grow stronger and deeper as a result'.
Discussion of the Pre-Modernist Gaudi was dropped from the new version, on grounds of consistency. By now Jencks had become a tireless enthusiast of the cause, and prolific taxonomer of its development. Dropping the claim that modernism had collapsed in the early seventies, Jencks conceded that its dynamic still survived, if in paroxysmic form, as an aesthetic of technological prowess increasingly detached from functional pretexts -- but still impervious to the play of retrospect and allusion that marked postmodernism: Foster and Rogers as against Moore and Graves.
No matter how productive it might seem -- like the cross-bow in the first years of fire-arms -such ultra-modernism was historically a rearguard.
It was postmodernism, its symbolic resources answering to the contemporary need for a new spirituality, as once the exuberant baroque of the Counter-Reformation had done, that represented the advanced art of the age.
By the mid-eighties Jencks was celebrating the Post-Modern as a world civilization of plural tolerance and superabundant choice, that was 'making nonsense' of such outmoded polarities as 'left- and right-wing, capitalist and working class'. In a society where information now mattered more than production, 'there is no longer an artistic avant-garde', since 'there is no enemy to conquer' in the global electronic network.
Out of their kaleidoscopic creations, it was to be hoped, might emerge 'a shared symbolic order of the kind that a religion provides' 21 -- the ultimate agenda of postmodernism. In aesthetic cross-dress, Toynbee's syncretistic dream had returned. Montreal -- Paris The architectural capture of the blazon of the postmodern, which can be dated from , proved durable. The primary association of the term has ever since been with the newest forms of built space. But this shift was followed, all but immediately, by a further extension of its range, in an unexpected direction.
Lyotard had acquired the term directly from Hassan. Three years earlier, he had addressed a conference at Milwaukee on the postmodern in the performing arts orchestrated by Hassan.
Declaring 'the stakes of postmodernism as a whole' were 'not to exhibit truth within the closure of representation but to set up perspectives within the return of the will', Lyotard extolled Michael Snow's famous experimental film of an empty Canadian landscape scanned by an immobile swivelling camera, and Duchamp's spatial projections. Hassan gave the key-note address at this conference. For the intellectual contact between the two at this time, see La Condition Postmoderne, notes 1, , , and The Postmodern Turn, pp.
For if society was now best conceived, neither as an organic whole nor as a dualistic field of conflict Parsons or Marx , but as a web of linguistic communications, language itself -- 'the whole social bond' -- was composed of a multiplicity of different games, whose rules were incommensurable, and inter-relations agonistic. In these conditions, science became just one language game among others: it could no longer claim the imperial privilege over other forms of knowledge to which it had pretended in modern times.
In fact, its title to superiority as denotative truth over narrative styles of customary knowledge concealed the basis of its own legitimation, which classically rested on two forms of grand narrative itself.
The first of these, derived from the French Revolution, told a tale of humanity as the heroic agent of its own liberation through the advance of knowledge; the second, descending from German Idealism, a tale of spirit as the progressive unfolding of truth.
Such were the great justifying myths of modernity. The defining trait of the postmodern condition, by contrast, is the loss of credibility of these meta-narratives. For Lyotard, they have been undone by the immanent development of the sciences themselves: on the one hand, by a pluralization of types of argument, with the proliferation of paradox and paralogism -- anticipated within philosophy by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Levinas; and on the other hand, by a technification of proof, in which costly apparatuses, commanded by capital or the state, reduce 'truth' to 'performativity'.
Science in the service of power finds a new legitimation in efficiency. But the genuine pragmatics of postmoderne science lies not in the pursuit of the performative, but in the production of the paralogistic -- in microphysics, fractals, discoveries of chaos, 'theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable and paradoxical'. Rapport sur le Savoir, Paris , p. English translation: The Postmodern Condition, Minneapolis , p.
If this form is favoured by the 'system', it is not entirely subject to it. We should be happy it is modest and mixed, Lyotard concluded, because any pure alternative to the system would fatally come to resemble what it sought to oppose.
At the turn of the seventies, Hassan's essays -- essentially on literature -- had still to be collected; Jencks's writing was limited to architecture. In title and topic, The Postmodern Condition was the first book to treat postmodernity as a general change of human circumstance. The vantage-point of the philosopher assured it a wider echo, across audiences, than any previous intervention: it remains to this day perhaps the most widely cited work on the subject.
But taken in isolation -- as it usually is -- the book is a misleading guide to Lyotard's distinctive intellectual position.
For The Postmodern Condition, written as an official commission, is confined essentially to the epistemological fate of the natural sciences -- about which, as Lyotard later confessed, his knowledge was less than limited. The incoherence of Wittgenstein's original conception, often noted, was only compounded by Lyotard's claim that such games were both autarchic and agonistic, as if there could be conflict between what has no common measure.
It's simply the worst of my books, they're almost all bad, but that one's the worst': Lotta Poetica, Third Series, Vol 1, No 1, January , p. What the ostensibly scientific framework of Lyotard's 'report on knowledge' left out of view was either the arts or politics.
The curiosity of the book lay in the fact these were his two principal passions as a philosopher. A militant in the far-left group Socialisme ou Barbarie for a decade during which he was an outstandingly lucid commentator on the Algerian War, Lyotard remained active in its split-off Pouvoir Ouvrier for another two years.
Breaking with this group when he became convinced the proletariat was no longer a revolutionary subject capable of challenging capitalism, he was active in the university ferment at Nanterre in and still reinterpreting Marx for contemporary rebels as late as But with the ebb of insurgency in France, Lyotard's ideas shifted.
His first major philosophical work, Discours, Figure , advanced a figural rendering of Freudian drives, in opposition to Lacan's linguistic account of the unconscious, as the basis for a theory of art, illustrated by poems and paintings. We do not 22 want to destroy kapital because it is not rational, but because it is. Reason and power are all one'. There was 'nothing in kapitalism, no dialectic that will lead to its supersession, its overcoming in socialism: socialism, it is now plain to all, is identical to kapitalism.
All critique, far from surpassing, merely consolidates it. Art in this sense lay beneath all insurgent politics. To unmask 'the desire named Marx', a complete transcription was needed of political into libidinal economy, that would not shrink from the truth that exploitation itself was typically lived -- even by the early industrial workers -- as erotic enjoyment: masochistic or hysterical delectation in the destruction of physical health in mines and factories, or disintegration of personal identity in anonymous slums.
Capital was desired by those it dominated, then as now. Revolt against it came only when the pleasures it yielded became 'untenable', and there was an abrupt shift to new outlets.
But these had nothing to do with the traditional sanctimonies of the Left. Just as there was no alienation involved in popular investment in capital, so in disinvestment 'there is no libidinal dignity, nor libidinal liberty, nor libidinal fraternity' -just the quest for new affective intensities.
The Gaullist consensus of the early sixties had convinced him that the working class was now essentially integrated into capitalism. The ferment of the late sixties gave him hope that generation rather than class -youth across the world -- might be the harbinger of revolt. The euphoric wave of consumerism that washed over the country in the early and mid-seventies then led to widespread theorizations of capitalism as a stream-lined machinery of desire.
By , however, the Socialist and Communist Parties had agreed on a Common Programme, and looked increasingly likely to win the next legislative elections. In the vicissitudes of Lyotard's political trajectory, there had always been one constant.
Socialisme ou Barbarie was vehemently anti-communist from the first, and whatever his other changes of mood or conviction, this remained an ineradicable element in his outlook. In he confided to startled friends in America that his Presidential choice was Giscard, since Mitterrand relied on Communist support. As the elections approached, with the danger of actual PCF participation in government, he therefore could not but feel ambivalence towards the Nouveaux Philosophes.
On the one hand, their furious attacks on communism were salutary; on the other, they were visibly a light-weight coterie caught up in a compromising embrace with official power. It was here that he first formulated the idea of meta-narratives that was to figure so prominently in The Postmodern Condition, and made its real target crystal-clear. Just one 'master narrative' lay at the origin of the term: Marxism. Fortunately, its ascendancy was now at last eroded by the innumerable little tidings from the Gulag.
It was true that in the West there existed a grand narrative of capital too; but it was preferable to that of the Party, since it was 'godless' -- 'capitalism has no respect for any one story', for 'its narrative is about everything and nothing'. Les Transformateurs Duchamp presented the creator of the Large Glass and Given as the critical artist of the non-isomorphic, of incongruences and incommensurabilities.
Lyotard's first use of the terms 'grand narrative' and 'meta-narrative' identifies their referent without further ado as Marxism: pp.
You miss the essential, which isn't the growth of the forces of production at any price, nor even the death of many workers, as Marx often says with a cynicism adorned with Darwinism. You miss the energy that later spread through the arts and sciences, the jubilation and the pain of discovering that you can hold out live, work, think, be affected in a place where it had been judged senseless to do so.
Indifferent to sense, hardness. It's too soon to see the woman laying herself bare on the Glass, and it's too late on the 24 stage of the Given.
The performer is a complex transformer, a battery of metamorphosis machines. There is no art, because there are no objects. There are only transformations, redistributions of energy. The world is a multiplicity of apparatuses that transform units of energy into one other. The 'report on knowledge' left the two questions of most abiding concern to Lyotard suspended. What were the implications of postmodernity for art and politics?
Lyotard was quickly forced to reply to the first, where he found himself in an awkward position. When he wrote The Postmodern Condition he was quite unaware of the deployment of the term in architecture, perhaps the only art on which he had never written, with an aesthetic meaning antithetical to everything that he valued.
This ignorance could not last long. By he was apprised of Jencks's construction of the postmodern, and its widespread reception in North America. His reaction was acrid. What then could authentic postmodern be? Preempted by a usage he execrated, Lyotard's answer was lame. The postmodern did not come after the modern, but was a motion of internal renewal within it from the first -- that current whose response to the shattering of the real was the opposite of nostalgia for its unity: rather a jubilant acceptance of the freedom of invention it released.
But this was no luxuriance. The avant-garde art Lyotard singled out for approval a year later was Minimalism -- the sublime as privation. What buoyed the art market, by contrast, was the kitsch celebrated by Jencks: 'amalgamation, ornamentation, pastiche -- flattering the "taste" of a public that can have no taste'.
Here the discomfiture came from the course of history itself. In The Postmodern Condition Lyotard had announced the eclipse of all grand narratives. The one whose death he above all sought to certify was, of course, classical socialism.
In subsequent texts, he would extend the list of grand narratives that were now defunct: Christian redemption, Enlightenment progress, Hegelian spirit, Romantic unity, Nazi racism, Keynesian equilibrium. English translation, "'Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism? Causeries Sur le Temps, Paris , p. What, then, of capitalism? At the time Lyotard was writing, at the tail-end of the Carter era, the West -- then entering a severe recession -- was in far from boisterous ideological mood.
Hence he could suggest with at any rate a semblance of plausibility that contemporary capitalism was validated by no more than a performance principle, which was a mere shadow of real legitimation. With the sharp change of conjuncture in the eighties -- the euphoria of the Reagan boom, and the triumphant ideological offensive of the Right, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet bloc at the end of the decade -- this position lost all credibility.
Far from grand narratives having disappeared, it looked as if for the first time in history the world was failing under the sway of the most grandiose of all -- a single, universal story of liberty and prosperity, the global victory of the market. How was Lyotard to adjust to this uncovenanted development? His initial reaction was to insist that capitalism, though it might seem to represent a universal finality of history, in fact destroyed any -since it embodied no higher values than mere factual security.
It is present everywhere, but as necessity rather than finality'. At best perhaps, it concealed a quasi-norm -'saving time': but could that really be regarded as a universal end? By the end of the nineties, Lyotard had found a stronger exit from his difficulty. Capitalism, he had started to argue much earlier, was not to be understood primarily as a socio-economic phenomenon at all.
As a system, capitalism has as its heat source not the labour force but energy itself, physics the system is not isolated. As figure, capitalism derives its force from the Idea of infinity. It can appear in human experience as the desire for money, the desire for power, or the desire for novelty.
But these desires are the anthropological translation of something that is ontologically the "instantiation" of infinity in the will. This "instantiation" does not take place according to social class. Social classes are not pertinent ontological categories'. The triumph of capitalism over rival systems, he now argued, was the outcome of a process of natural selection that pre-dated human life itself. In the incommensurable vastness of the cosmos, where all bodies are subject to entropy, an aboriginal chance -a 'contingent constellation of energy forms' -- gave rise in one tiny planet to rudimentary living systems.
Because external energy was limited, these had to compete with each other, in a perpetually fortuitous path of evolution. Eventually, after millions of years, a human species emerged capable of words and tools; then 'various improbable forms of human aggregation arose, and they were selected according to their ability to discover, capture and save sources of energy'. After further millennia, punctuated by the neolithic and industrial revolutions, 'systems called liberal democracies' proved themselves best at this task, trouncing communist or islamist competitors, and moderating ecological dangers.
But to meet this challenge, the system was already developing the prostheses that would allow it to survive after solar sources of energy were wiped out'. But, he insists, 'the fable is realistic because it recounts the story of a force which makes, unmakes and remakes reality'. What the fable depicts is a conflict between two energy processes. But within this process of entropy, which is necessary and continuous, another process that is contingent and discontinuous, at least for a long time, acts in a contrary sense by increasing differentiation of its systems.
This movement cannot halt the first unless it could find a means to refuel the sun , but it can escape from catastrophe by abandoning its cosmic habitat'.
The ultimate motor of capitalism is thus not thirst for profit, or any human desire: it is rather development as neguentropy. Human beings are an invention of development'. Because, Lyotard maintains, it is a story without historicity or hope. The fable is postmodern because 'it has no finality in any horizon of emancipation'.
Human beings, as witnesses of development, may set their faces against a process of which they are vehicles. Yet Lyotard also freely describes his story as a 'tragedy of energy' which 'like Oedipus Rex ends badly', yet also 'like Oedipus at Colonnus allows an ultimate remission'.
Nothing in Lyotard's original account of metanarratives confined them to the idea of emancipation -- which was only one of the two modern discourses of legitimation he sought to trace. The postmodern fable would still be a grand narrative, even were it exempt from the theme. But in fact, of course, it is not. More pointedly still, in the other -interchangeable -- register of Lyotard's narrative, capitalism notoriously speaks the language of emancipation more continually and confidently than ever before.
Elsewhere, Lyotard is forced to acknowledge this. Indeed, he admits: 'Emancipation is no longer the task of gaining and imposing liberty from the outside' -- rather it is 'an ideal that the system itself endeavours to actualize in most of the areas it covers, such as work, taxation, marketplace, family, sex, race, school, culture, communication'.
Obstacles and resistances only encourage it to become more open and complex, promoting spontaneous undertakings -- and 'that is tangible emancipation'. If the job of the critic is still to denounce the shortcomings of the system, 'such critiques, whatever form they take, are needed by the system for discharging the task of emancipation more effectively'. From the seventies onwards, so long as communism existed as an alternative to capitalism, the latter was a lesser evil -he could even sardonically celebrate it as, by contrast, a pleasurable order.
Once the Soviet bloc had disintegrated, the hegemony of capital became less palatable. Its ideological triumph appeared to vindicate just the kind of legitimating narrative whose obituary Lyotard had set out to write. Rather than confronting the new reality on a political plane, his solution was a metaphysical sublimation of it.
Suitably projected into inter-galactic space, his original energetics could put capitalism into perspective as no more than an eddy of a larger cosmic adventure. The bitter-sweet consolation this alteration of scale might offer a former militant is clear. The 'postmodern fable' did not spell any final reconciliation with capital.
On the contrary, Lyotard now recovered accents of opposition long muted in his work: a denunciation of global inequality and cultural lobotomy, and scorn for socialdemocratic reformism, recalling his revolutionary past. The postmodern was 'melancholy'. The lecture occupies a peculiar place in the discourse of postmodernity. Its substance touches only to a limited degree on the postmodern; yet the effect was to highlight it as a henceforth standard referent. This paradoxical outcome was largely, of course, due to Habermas's standing in the AngloSaxon world as premier European philosopher of the age.
But it was also a function of the critical stance of his intervention. For the first time since the take-off of the idea of postmodernity in the late seventies, it received abrasive treatment. If the emergence of an intellectual terrain typically requires a negative pole for its productive tension, it was Habermas who supplied it. To believe, as I once did, that the first kind of inhumanity can relay the second, give it expression, is an error.
The effect of the system is rather to consign what escapes it to oblivion: p. More recently, in "'La Mainmise'", Lyotard reiterates the 'fable of development', but changes register: here it 'anticipates a contradiction' -- for 'the process of development runs counter to the human design of emancipation', although it claims to be at one with it. To the question -'Is there any instance within us that asks to be emancipated from this supposed emancipation? Let us know here. System error. Please try again!
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