Beyond Postmodernism

Beyond Postmodernism:
Onto the Postcontemporary

Edited by

Christopher K. Brooks
 Beyond Postmodernism: Onto the Postcontemporary,
Edited by Christopher K. Brooks

This book first published 2013

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2013 by Christopher K. Brooks and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-5272-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5272-2

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Images ........................................................................................... vii

List of Tables ........................................................................................... viii

Introduction ............................................................................................... ix

To Be Born Is to Die: A Critical Overview of The Satanic Verses

and Global Modernism ............................................................................... 1
Clara Eisinger

Everybody Wants to Rule the World: Theory of Exhaustion

and the Question of Identity ..................................................................... 18
Kevin Cryderman

We Have Never Been Gendered: The Postcontemporary Case of Julia

Ward Howe’s Hermaphrodite ................................................................... 33
Kimberly Engber

Language and Literature in Transhumanism ............................................ 46

Jana Vizmuller-Zocco

Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism: Autonomy and Automation

in Culture, Technology, and Education .................................................... 63
Bob Samuels

Metafiction in the Post-Technological Age: The Case of The People

of Paper and MetaMaus ............................................................................ 92
Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis

The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West—to Himself?

Slavoj Žižek and the Perils of Going Public ........................................... 114
Evan Gottlieb
vi Table of Contents

Defining the Postcontemporary Moment ................................................ 134

Christopher K. Brooks

Afterword ............................................................................................... 152

Bibliography ........................................................................................... 154

Contributors ............................................................................................ 170

Index ....................................................................................................... 172

 LIST OF IMAGES

Figure 1: Plascencia, The People of Paper 96–7 .................................... 105

Figure 2: Žižek, RESIST ATTACK UNDERMINE .............................. 132
Figure 3: PC Castle ................................................................................. 141
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Enhancing communication in general ........................................ 54

Table 2: Enhancing communicative/cultural language functions ............. 55
Table 3: Enhancing internal features of verbal language.......................... 57
 INTRODUCTION

In the world of today, if an individual wishes to verify the emerging

notoriety of a word or concept, one uses a search engine to verify how
many “hits” or “searches” have been done for that term. The more widely
used the term, the more clear the case for its importance and its study.
Postmodernism, for example, yields hundreds of thousands of search
results and too many pages to utilize in an academic year. Significantly, a
search for the term “postcontemporary” results in a typical search engine
asking if the word is actually two words or hyphenated, and sometimes
asks “Do you mean . . . ?” some other term. Instructed to seek a single
word, a search engine will yield as few as eight entries or as many as
fifteen. A search to find the term in a book, monograph, journal essay, or
dissertation abstract would prove virtually fruitless, but everyone knows
that it takes months or even years for ideas to find their way into scholarly
publications, which makes the internet so useful. But Fredric Jameson uses
the term “postcontemporary” in multiple works in the series that he and
Stanley Fish oversee from Duke University under the umbrella title Post-
Contemporary Interventions. Note the hyphen, and pay special attention to
the curious fact that not one work in the Duke series (and they are many)
employs the term postcontemporary in a title or sub-title or, as much as I
have read, a chapter title. But there the word is, undefined, bandied about,
an occasional signifier that Jameson employs to describe the society in
which we live as the postmodern period struggles to maintain utility. And,
by golly, if Jameson and Fish associate their names with “post-
contemporary interventions,” then that opens the door to significant
dialogue that is seemingly not taking place in literary studies. Oh, but we
postcontemporists are so few, while so many Postmodernists tout the reign
of indecisiveness as the destiny of literary interpretation, that much of the
early dialogue concerning the postcontemporary has been uttered in
whispers. Even as I set up two consecutive national panels at major
literary conferences to discuss the state of literary theory after
postmodernism, a bevy of postmodernists came aboard to champion the
eternal ubiquity of their school of thought. As I turned down many of the
postmodern ilk as panelists, the conference area chairs restored them so
that a “dialogue” between postmodernists and postcontemporists might
take place. Argue as I did that postmodernism has been and continues to
x Introduction

be a filibustering monologue against “the impulse to change” (which I

discuss later), the daily presentations ended with little movement from
intellectual bases or exchange of contact information for further dialoging.
Postmodernism is established and has many followers. Only a few of the
presentations offered an out-and-out diatribe against the dominance of
postmodernism. Most offered a treaty, citing that things have changed
since 9/11 and asserting that postmodernism would change with the times.
For that reason, this anthology offers only eight essays. We are few but
determined to be heard.
And yet another reason arises for this collection appearing at this time.
The term postcontemporary is already being used in the realm of art and
agriculture—and has been for half a decade. I first read about it only five
years ago in the program for an Agricultural Conference taking place in
Albuquerque and which I cite in my chapter. What I have read in that
program and since that time has alerted me that a significant change is
afoot in a time where everything is upgraded, re-made, replaced, revised
and/or re-thought on a daily basis. And I know with a fair amount of
certainty that postmodernism is not the cause and cannot be the ideology
appointed to describe that change. It is too busy, is always too busy,
tracing its own heritage, assimilating the past into its own image, and re-
formulating how it can remain relevant. It writes a history in which it is
both player and a scribe, witness and a jury. Some thinkers consider that a
conflict of interest. Such thinkers as the essayists in this collection seek to
negotiate a type of critical vision in which postmodernism is either a minor
player or an understudy. Some might describe this as “thinking outside the
box,” but that would locate postmodernity as the box and situate
postcontemporary thought—now called “poco” by some adherents—in a
binary relationship with the very ideology it seeks to leave behind. There
is no box. There is the future, change, opportunity, and optimism. There
are individuals in communities within nations within the global
population. All thought starts with those individuals within the context of
quotidian experience. The Postcontemporary may be described as a
movement that embraces ongoing and sudden change; it assumes the need
and the justification for a forward-moving global society in all areas of
human endeavor. As Jameson describes it, postcontemporary society is
already here. We may now declare it ready for negotiation, as the writers
of this collection are ready to display.
In her chapter, Clara Eisinger takes on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic
Verses with an assertion that Rushdie’s narrative manipulations of the
dialogue and of the reader preclude a postmodern interpretation. She
writes,
 Beyond Postmodernism: Onto the Postcontemporary xi

“Thus, however powerfully postmodern indeterminism appears to factor

into the novel, one should never dare to take literally Rushdie’s notorious
trickery and wordplay.”1

This is one of the critical gestures a postcontemporist must make: the

warning that the interpretative and the literal relate in a way that requires a
critical choice, a choice that may decide that “postmodern indeterminism”
is a red herring, a simple literary device, like irony, that serves to entrap a
reader, not empower that reader’s interpretation. Eisinger then goes on to
recognize one of the buzzwords of postmodern closure, “hybrid.” She
observes,

“Many critical discussions of The Satanic Verses offer readings of the

novel as hybrid, chaotic, discontinuous, intertextual, fragmented,
postmodern, modern, or postcolonial: a sea of theories and opinions.”2

As you will see in my short Afterword, the term “hybrid” has become a
convenient term that by labeling a work also precludes its interpretation.
One simply identifies the genres that have been merged and reads through
multiple generic lenses. Finally, in citing David Punter, Eisinger offers the
greatest sanction of postmodern inquiry when she maintains “the question
of interpretation is suspended in favour of a radical admission of
incomprehension.”3 It is easier to claim indeterminism than to pursue an
exhaustive interpretation. Eisinger’s struggle to articulate the ludic
meaning of Rushdie’s work is the struggle to elude postmodernity’s legacy
of “openendedness.” That is the struggle all postcontemporists face: to
complete the interpretive process. This is not to say that some literary
works reach an indeterminate point of closure. But to too-readily “favour”
that indeterminate description is to agree to disagree without exhausting
the possibility of finding some agreed upon fixed meaning.
Kevin Cryderman moves through numerous “post-“ ideologies, and
also moves from Woody Allen to South Park, as he reaches an assertion
that all of these interpretive strategies are mere authority claims. He
emphasizes near the center of his chapter that “all identity categories
operate as cultures of belief/argument.”4 Postmodernity, then, is an
“identity category” with more adherents than any other, which Cryderman
intuits as he moves through post-identity and post-post identity to finally

1
Ex infra, 2-3.
2
Ex infra, 5-6.
3
Ex infra, 7.
4
Ex infra, 23.
xii Introduction

endorse exhaustion theory as an alternative way of categorizing that which

all other ideologies seek to label. He explains,

“‘post post-identity’ discourse (a.k.a. ‘anti-identity,’ ‘post-ethnicity’ or

‘post-postmodern’) calls into question these assumptions of identity as a
central organizing principle. Post post-identity is an incisive and valuable
challenge to the primacy of socially ascribed identities or subject positions
as operative terms.”5

Cryderman cites Michael Millner as Millner “encapsulates the heart of a

theoretical trend towards post-postmodernism, specifically on the question
of identity,” offering a roster of sixteen identity strategies that emerged in
the 1990s, including “in-process, provisional, hybrid, partial, fragmentary,
fluid, transitional, transnational” and “cosmopolitan,” to name only some.6
How does a new millennial scholar interpret a Woody Allen movie or a
South Park arc of episodes about ginger-colored hair—how does one
construct the identity of fictional ironic characters for purposes of
discussion—when the legacy of postmodernity is claimed by scores of
heirs? If a break did occur after or because of 9/11, who claims the
microphone in the ensuing era of flux? Said succinctly,

“theory of exhaustion tends to operate as a project of reclamation for

earlier critical, philosophical and political frameworks that the recent
academic orthodoxy of ‘theory’ had marginalized.”7

What could be the most “orthodox theory” with the power to marginalize
other ideologies? Jameson argues that many of the most promising of
critical theories fell by the wayside of postmodernism because they were
too narrow, being gender- or author- or reader- or class-oriented works.
None were broad enough to take on postmodern discourse. Cryderman
begs to differ, looking for a narrative of meaningfulness in the critical
movements that postmodernism has declared wanting.
Kimberly Engber rescues from critical neglect Julia Ward Howe’s
nineteenth-century unfinished narrative The Hermaphrodite. She does so
by examining critical methods of interpreting Howe’s work to evaluate
how they fare at that critical task, concluding that Howe’s work is
postcontemporary because the language of established critical methods
fails to cope with Howe’s multifaceted narrative. Establishing that The

5
Ex infra, 18.
6
Ex infra, 18-19.
7
Ex infra, 20.
 Beyond Postmodernism: Onto the Postcontemporary xiii

Hermaphrodite “hovers between the nineteenth century when it was

written and the twenty first century when it was first published,” Engber
asserts

“neither formalism nor feminism nor historicism fully accounts for the
ambiguous character and unfinished plot. Howe’s hermaphrodite is a
postcontemporary work. This conclusion implies a position within the
relatively new field of posthumanist studies. I consider posthumanism a
reading practice rather than a point in time or a contemporary experience.”8

An interested reader can connect the 2004 publication of Howe’s

nineteenth century work to that of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, a 2002
Pulitzer Prize winning novel about a “contemporary” hermaphrodite.
Critics struggle with classifying and defining Eugenides’ work, typically
calling it, once again, a “hybrid.” For the same reason that I would assign
Middlesex the status of being a postcontemporary work—it defies the
language of critical evaluation—Engber questions the interpretive efforts
made involving Howe’s narrative. Her critique of Howe scholar Gary
Williams’ evaluation represents a postcontemporary intervention:

“Williams’s ‘psychological androgyny’ gets closer to the reading

experience, but Williams sounds squeamish. Why only psychological?
While a psychological reading is in many ways persuasive, it limits our
understanding of the hermaphrodite to what was thwarted within the social
world of nineteenth-century America. Literary study has the great
advantage of examining what it was possible to imagine.”9

This crucial notion—that it is “possible to imagine” so much more than

any given school of interpretation can offer—marks the authority that
postcontemporary thought wishes to champion. Interpretation is not an
institutional function, nor is it a closed set of beliefs. It begins with one
reader and one text. This is already Jameson’s claim for postmodernism,
but, as Engber implies, postmodernity offered nothing to accomplish the
critical reclamation of Howe’s work, not for over one hundred years. It,
too, was marginalized until a different kind of thought process allowed
Engber to re-interview a work that now is being celebrated.
Jana Vizmuller-Zocco echoes a point made by Kimberly Engber. The
state of contemporary criticism is seemingly futureless without something
new to follow or replace postmodernism. She writes,

8
Ex infra, 34.
9
Ex infra, 40.
xiv Introduction

“It is likely that musing about the post-humanist, postmodern,

contemporary world leads into a dead end. It is much more urgent, albeit
disturbing, for those who live and breathe verbal language together with
one of its most significant products, literature, to cast their sights toward
the future. It is necessarily an urgent voyage because language and
literature, if they are indeed what is most human about humanity, can no
longer claim their pre-eminence.”10

This is a crucial tenet for this collection and this movement: postcontemporary
thought is future-oriented and unwilling to accept an indeterminate
conclusion until all interpretive motions have been made. And while
Engber found inspiration in posthumanist studies, Vizmuller-Zocco turns
to the new ideology of transhumanist studies. Indeed, one of the
compelling aspects of her chapter involves biolinguistics, the science of
developing a new and evolved language for both an enhanced and a future
human population. As she introduces the section on future language needs,
Vizmuller-Zocco declares,

“it is instructive to concisely analyze the language of transhumanists, in

other words, the semantic underpinnings of this movement, frequently used
key words or phrases and their meanings, and the effects these linguistic
processes have on the increasing popularity of transhumanism.”11

Much of her work sounds like and aligns with science-fiction and will
become a remarkable critical tool for scholars working in that genre, but
Vizmuller-Zocco is not writing in an imaginative mode. Transhumanism is
already impacting medicine and health practices, among others. And while
one of my claims for the transcending of the postmodern era is that critical
idioms have reached a state of stasis, Vizmuller-Zocco’s essay is filled
with the kind of neologisms that can only be associated with an entirely
innovative critical language. That makes her work postcontemporary in
very many ways.
Bob Samuels complements Vizmuller-Zocco’s thinking beautifully.
Samuels tracks four distinct postmodern movements or practices,
maintaining that the tracks are both misunderstood and yet participate in
creating that misunderstanding. Technology and the desire by the human
being to be completed by technology, even merged into machinery, is one
of Samuels’ striking images. The classical opposition of flesh and machine
is blurred, as many of the postmodern binary oppositions must be
conflated for a new way of thinking to emerge. As Samuels puts it,

10
Ex infra, 46.
11
Ex infra, 50.
 Beyond Postmodernism: Onto the Postcontemporary xv

“This chapter argues that in order to understand what happens after

postmodernity, we have to rethink many of the cultural oppositions that
have shaped the Western tradition since the start of the modern era. To be
precise, we can no longer base our analysis of culture, identity, and
technology on the traditional conflicts between the public and the private,
the subject and the object, and the human and the machine.”12

Samuels is also pertinent to this collection in his examination of the

postmodern use of the hybrid, though he does not use that exact wording:

“Some people have rightly claimed that our incessant recombining of

diverse cultural representations does not necessarily help us to understand
or encounter other cultural worlds. I would add that while this aesthetic
version of postmodernity is probably the most prevalent, it is also the
easiest to dismiss for its tendency to be superficial and short-lived.”13

Recombining forms allows postmodernity to re-invent itself through its

use of extant ideologies that can be “renewed” while precluding genuinely
innovative thinking. And in a crucial statement for this study, Samuels,
like others in this collection, decries the postmodern insistence on
indeterminism, arguing that the emergence of many voices does not
eliminate the possibility of reaching an interpretive accord:

“Thus, in recognizing the vital values and historical contributions of

diverse social groups, multiculturalists have posited that there is no single,
universal source for knowledge or truth. Unfortunately, this multicultural
idea has often been confused with the extreme postmodernist notion that
there are no truths or moral values since everything is relative to one’s own
culture.”14

In recognizing the four types of postmodernism and exposing the flawed

oppositional theories that underline those ideologies, Samuels paves the
way something new and different to usher in the era of the
“postpostmodern.” I call what Samuels has accomplished yet another
postcontemporary intervention.
Lissi Krikelis offers her critique of postmodernity by examining those
situations wherein metafiction is simply and errantly conflated so
completely with the ideology of postmodern discourse that metafiction
loses its identity. If metafiction is indeed an independent form of

12
Ex infra, 63.
13
Ex infra, 65.
14
Ex infra, 64.
xvi Introduction

discourse, how did this conflation take place, save perhaps for the
assimilative process through which postmodernity refuels itself? Krikelis
moves directly to her concern:

“Most metafictional novels breathe the postmodern air and produce

artifacts that reflect its thought and its ideological norms. Metafiction and
postmodern fiction are associated to the point of convergence, but it is
important to underscore that although they may connote similar references,
at times they may be completely dissociated. It is unquestionably
established that the practice of metafiction predates postmodernism, with
examples like Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605/1615), Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy (1759) or Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist (1796). What has not
become equally clear, however, is metafiction’s independence.”15

This is another crucial aspect of the critique of postmodernism and a point

of departure for the postcontemporist. Many emergent theories, creative
practices, and shifting genres are simply “lumped” into postmodern
discourse when some seek independence. Indeed, as Evan Gottlieb will
argue in the ensuing chapter, some figures associated with postmodernism
wish their alignment with that ideology to end, some claiming they have
never adhered to postmodernism’s practices whatsoever. Krikelis
investigates the link between modernism and postmodernism to find the
point where a new departure from modernism might be claimed—one that
would grant metafiction its liberty while also aiding postcontemporary
thinking find its way:

“The conceptualization of postmodernism is contingent upon modernist

tendencies, and any discussion of the former intuitively, and by necessity,
entails a discussion of the latter. However, could it be that at the turn of the
millennium the binary modern/postmodern should be transposed to a
different binary: postmodern/its beyond?”16

Postcontemporary thought would willingly slide onto the “vacant” side of

the slash, if only to obliterate the slash in its new tenancy.
Evan Gottlieb offers another rebuttal of postmodernism through his
analysis of Slavoj Zizek, a critical and cultural theorist who appears in a
variety of “Who’s who in Postmodernism” rosters but who has throughout
his writing career disavowed being a “postmodernist”:

15
Ex infra, 92-3.
16
Ex infra, 94.
 Beyond Postmodernism: Onto the Postcontemporary xvii

“When he first began to receive sustained attention in the English-speaking

world in the early 1990s, highbrow, non-academic media outlets like The
New York Times and The New Republic regularly lumped Žižek in with
those “postmodernists,” like Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose apparent
lack of belief in stable meanings and Truth (with a capital “T”) was
routinely frowned upon. Žižek, for his part, was clear from the start that he
had no desire to be included in such company: significant portions of
several of his texts from the 1990s and early 2000s are devoted to
critiquing Derrida, Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and other theorists who, for
better or worse, were associated with postmodernism.”17

By mis-classifying Zizek, those who labeled him a postmodernist created a

situation in which his work were and have been misinterpreted, for
theorists are decoded according to their ideological school:

“Removed from this clarifying and deepening intellectual context, his

characteristically pugnacious, counter-intuitive arguments seem to at best
to invite misreadings, and at worst to reinforce prejudices already nursed
by a general public highly prone (at least in America) to anti-
intellectualism.”18

This is yet another of the tasks of the postcontemporist: the emancipation,

not of a work of literature, not of a critical concept, and not of a literary
movement, but of a major ideological figure who disdains classification
and who declines membership in the dominant school of thought—an act
which ensures his inclusion in the roster of postmodern thinkers. Of
course, that inclusion can only be done by a member of the club whose
company Zizek wishes to disdain. How many theoretical movements
would share Zizek’s irritation if they could only speak?
The final essay of this collection is my own, wherein I argue that
postmodernism has plotted a design that ensures it ongoing dominance in
our culture. Fredric Jameson is my authority for such a claim, for he
describes a nefarious formula of assimilation by which the dominant
ideology remains in charge. That which represents change, Jameson
writes, will simply be assimilated into the “authentically modern
postmodern.” What was innovation is now the classical modern, the
“new” having become the established way of seeing things for which
postmodernity remains the ever-present, ever-renewing response. It is the
reaction to any other intellectual action, and has been for perhaps sixty

17
Ex infra, 130.
18
Ex infra, 125.
xviii Introduction

years, and proposes to stay viable for sixty more. My crucial claim is as
follows:

“Postmodernism wishes to assert that the emergence of multiple discourses

was merely an early chapter in the autobiography of postmodern discourse,
all fruits from a single tree. What is needed is a new way of thinking in a
society—a postcontemporary society—that realizes it has been the locus of
nothing but new practices for fifty years, all of which have been
assimilated and packaged for them under one singular heading.”19

From there, I trace the emergence of the term postcontemporary through

various disciplines which actually employ the word to argue that similar
changes in literary criticism reflect “postcontemporary thought.” What I
find in other disciplines and emerging in recent literary and critical works
leads me to make this claim:

“Time, immediacy, the moment, the here and now mark the language of
postcontemporary discourse. The past is simply an archive, a deleted email
or erased DVR recording, in a world with immediate news coverage (think
9/11) and no privacy whatsoever. And we are just starting to realize this. In
all recent works on the post 9-11 world that I have read, the authors
suggest that not only postmodernity but the state of contemporary thought
must be re-envisioned and assigned a new vocabulary.”20

My work comes closest to a manifesto, calling for change because it is the

pre-eminent force of our daily lives and so should inform our theory. I
don’t believe that writing one’s ideas—sometimes fresh, startling, visionary
ideas—only to see them eventually assimilated by the eminent domain of
thought, or so I see it, is the way to encourage new critical thinking. It is
time for penitent art to re-appear, for the well of postmodernity is running
dry.
As the previous summaries of the essays in this collection have
suggested, the creation of a new vocabulary—and a renewing for critical
purposes of an established one—is taking place in the here and now. It
occurs when writers such as those examined by my fellow essayists are
interpreted and decoded through a new lens. It takes place when scholars
raised in a theory-rich age begin to question the very tenets of their
upbringing. And it occurs when readers such as those examining this
collection find something to celebrate. No new ground is broken by those
who toe the line.

19
Ex infra, 139.
20
Ex infra, 145.
 TO BE BORN IS TO DIE:
A CRITICAL OVERVIEW OF THE SATANIC
VERSES AND GLOBAL MODERNISM

CLARA EISINGER

The migrant experience, as expressed in postcolonial literature, is

marked by chaos and an inability to make sense of the new world in which
the migrant finds him or herself. In Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
(1988), a range of spatio-temporal narrative experiments reveals the
bewildering nature of ethnic migration in Great Britain specifically, as
migrants struggle with ostracism, dislocation, difference, and the often-
traumatic aftermath of national and personal histories. This displacement
and disorientation occurs in a London where landmarks mutate and
oscillate, appear suddenly and then vanish as if they had never existed. It
is a London in which people may fall from the sky and in which characters
may wake from an uneasy post-fall sleep to discover that they no longer
have faces, as Saladin finds when he gazes into Rosa Diamond’s mirror
and sees: “that old cherubic face staring out at him once again,”1 a
reminder of a time when “he looked like a featureless jellyfish,”2 with no
identity and no sense of belonging. He attempts to remind himself of his
own reality as immigration police comb the beach searching for him, but
he nevertheless fears that “the world did not exist beyond that beach down
there…If he weren’t careful, if he rushed matters, he would fall off the
edge, into clouds. Things had to be made.”3 Eventually, he does fall into a
cloud—the Black Maria cloud of the police van, of the officers who signal
“approaching doom”4—a realm in which his watch has vanished, all
clocks have disappeared, manticores offer him advice, and his only
method of escape involves risking and subsequently undergoing a form of

1
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Random House, 2008), 139.
2
Rushdie, Satanic Verses, 139.
3
Ibid., 140.
4
Ibid., 140.
2 To Be Born Is to Die

death, a retreat into a church in which various renditions of the same

person stare back at him, hostile and unforgiving.
Many critics read this novel as exemplary of postmodernism because
of story-arcs such as this one, which appears to present readers with an
infinite state of flux and play in which people possess blank faces, clocks
do not exist, spaces cease to make sense (for instance, when Saladin
savages the Argentinian bedsheets on an English bed, as if these two
countries had somehow merged into one another), and characters
themselves often comment on the nature of their lives as an apparent
patchwork or stitched canvas of hybrid elements: infinite, intangible,
immeasurable. When confronted by a Saladin who fears her exploitation at
the hands of Billy Battuta, Mimi Mamoulian scoffs, “I have read
Finnegans Wake and am conversant with postmodernist critiques of the
West, e.g. that we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a
‘flattened’ world. When I become the voice of a bottle of bubble-bath, I
am entering Flatland knowingly.”5 Saladin despairs at these words,
realizing, “I am a man…who does not know the score, living in an amoral,
survivalist, get-away-with-it world.”6 He feels empty, disillusioned by this
knowledge, reaching the pinnacle of his existential frustration when he
discovers that Gibreel has lied to a film magazine, claiming that he never
boarded the crashed Bostan. Railing against Gibreel, who clearly knows
“the score,” Saladin resembles, “at last… the very devil whose image he
had become.”7 Yet this is also the point at which his forehead swellings—
his horns—begin to diminish, making him seem less a devil than before,
even at the moment at which he most appears to be one.
Saladin gains back his human form by rejecting false versions of
reality and false narratives of the past and asserting the moral desirability
of truth over deception. Not long afterward, Mimi and Billy are finally
arrested for their financial scams/schemes and Mimi’s declaration of a
postmodern world appears foolish—after all, with her arrest, the ‘score’ is
settled in favor of honesty and legal justice, thus punishing her for her
outlook. Not all behaviors and worldviews are acceptable. Some histories
and events do not possess unlimited interpretative space: their effects and
outcomes are undeniable, irrefutable. Mimi actually did steal money and
Gibreel actually did board the plane. History, whether national or personal,
cannot be rewritten either indiscriminately or ignorantly: one must be
careful in one’s historical accounts in a way which Mimi is not. Thus,
however powerfully postmodern indeterminism appears to factor into the

5
Ibid., 270.
6
Ibid., 271.
7
Ibid., 281.
 Clara Eisinger 3

novel, one should never dare to take literally Rushdie’s notorious trickery
and wordplay. Though readers have no choice but to assume that Gibreel
is a quasi-angel while Saladin turns into a real goat—that some realities
are flexible and forever mutable while others cannot change so easily—
postmodernism is only one perspective which the novel offers.
Rushdie, for all of his postmodernist feints and allusions, constructs his
epic as a specifically modernist portrayal of the dislocation of massive
groups of people. This form of modernism functions as what Michael
Levenson terms a “social practice”8 rather than a solid, immutable type of
aesthetic movement, and is applicable to various locations and areas of
study. In the Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Levenson writes,

“If…social cataclysms left traces on Modernist art, so did that art inform
and to an extent form the conception of social life within historical crises.”9

Modernism, Levenson asserts, is a method of orientation by which artists

make sense of quandaries which are otherwise unsolvable and baffling,
without dismissing those quandaries as utterly impenetrable. It is a method
which is formed in its very exposure to crisis, enabling people to better
articulate and devise solutions to their disorientation.
Modernism always surpasses any one meaning or ideological
commitment. It is contextual, dialogical, and contestatory. Levenson
explains, “Any encounter with an artwork occurs within a social world, a
world vastly larger than a momentary contemplation […]. [Modernism]
has offered not one value but a region of commitments.”10 This region of
commitments is dedicated, wherever it appears, to exploring both the
limits of language and the ranges of expressible human experience.
Rushdie’s novel deals with these linguistic and experiential limits by
yoking the concept of sublimity to that of the diaspora. Specifically, the
sublimity that appears is characteristic of the experience of diaspora in its
resistance to words and its challenging of thought. Its un-representable
nature ultimately delineates the edges of an apocalypse which enables
personal change, growth, and a sense of un-limiting possibility through
contact with difference. Arising through this contact, the novel’s aesthetic
distortions further develop it and recast English social issues from a more
global perspective, represented by Indian migrants. Art in this context only
functions to the extent that Rushdie dares the very edge of the abyss and

8
Michael Levenson, Modernism (New Haven: Yale UP, 2011), 8.
9
Michael Levenson, Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, 2nd
ed., edited by Michael Levenson (New York: Cambridge UP, 2011), 5.
10
Levenson, Modernism, 9.
4 To Be Born Is to Die

then tips over into its darkness, falling into a world with no alphabet, no
dictionary, and very little direct capacity for translation.

Migration and the Problems of Representation

This surreal gesture of a world is one which the UK, with its large
ethnic populations, has courted since the mid-20th century. In Europe,
guest workers, Indian, and Pakistani immigrants form a significant part of
the vast masses of the unwanted. Great Britain in particular has always
prided itself upon racial purity and its native British “stock.”11 In spite of
Britain’s desire to keep out the “blacks,” however, many said “blacks”
have found their way to British sea and airports by dint of their status as
British Commonwealth subjects. Paul notes, “over the course of the decade
[1950-1960], colonial immigration to Britain increased incrementally
…climbing to 3,000 in 1953; 10,000…in 1954, 42,000 in 1955, [and]
46,000 in 1956.”12 In 1961, the number of incoming people hit a high of
136,000. For British government officials, such numbers presented a
danger to society—an overwhelming crowd of blacks, ready to drown out
British purity with their supposed habitual laziness and conflict-prone
natures.13 Therefore, the government took measures to limit immigration,
including issuing multiple classes of vouchers, the first two of which often
went to whites from countries such as Canada, the latter of which typically
went to darker-skinned migrants such as Indians and Pakistanis, whose
projected wait times could exceed fifty years.14
Unsurprisingly, then, so-called “black” immigrants to Great Britain
faced challenges the likes of which many of their white counterparts could
not imagine. Jamaicans entering the country encountered hostility and
resistance, “[reminding] them of unfriendliness and unfamiliarity.”15 (Paul
120). Indians and Pakistanis were not welcome either. Though they could
attempt to become British, they would never fit the model for proper
“British stock,” and returning home was not always a desirable option,
since Indian and Pakistani immigrants often considered themselves
members of the British Empire who deserved to experience its center and
not merely its peripheries—a center often unachievable not only for them,
but in fact for many others, including long-naturalized citizens such as

11
Kathleen Paul, Whitewashing Britain: Race and Citizenship in the Postwar Era
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997).
12
Paul, Whitewashing, 132.
13
Ibid., 124, 172.
14
Ibid., 172.
15
Ibid., 120.
 Clara Eisinger 5

Salman Rushdie, a member of India’s Muslim minority whose parents

moved to Karachi before he began attending Cambridge University.16 As
Homi Bhabha has noted in an excerpt from The New Statesman, 17
Rushdie’s magnum opus represents his “painful and problematic encounter
with the most intractable and intimate area of his imaginative life…a life
lived precariously on the cultural and political margins of modern [British]
society.”18 (114). In an interview with The Observer, Rushdie admitted,
“I’m not who I was supposed to be…I stepped out of that world, rather
like Gibreel. I have had the sense of having frequently to reconstruct my
life.”19 For Rushdie, the past represented a temporal break with the
present, and the man he has become is not a natural, continuous extension
of his personality in boyhood and adolescence. Life is fragmented, fragile.
It breaks and ruptures, and Rushdie appears to recognize this in his own
experiences as well as in those of his characters.20 He also recognizes
Britain’s tendency to catalyze this rupture with its trademark insistence
upon a racial purity which, once delineated, casts too many people as its
antithesis, leading to fear and despair. Rushdie’s novel seeks a solution
which may create a positive line of identity and cultural affiliation, but
which is not closed down, “pure,” or constructed only from certain
“stocks.” It finds this solution in global modernism, which, though,
originally crafted by artists of British/European stock, nevertheless lends
itself to a postcolonial context with its explorations of the sublime, the
diaspora, the opening of experience, and the discovery of a self that is
certain but uncertain, knowable yet constantly surprising.

The Constitution of the Diaspora and Contemporary

Critical Approaches to The Satanic Verses: An Overview
Many critical discussions of The Satanic Verses offer readings of the
novel as hybrid, chaotic, discontinuous, intertextual, fragmented, postmodern,

16
Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, eds., The Rushdie File (Syracuse: Syracuse
UP, 1990).
17
This has been collected in The Rushdie File.
18
Appignanesi and Maitland, Rushdie File, 114.
19
Ibid., 8.
20
For more information on Rushdie’s works, background, personal life, and the
controversy surrounding the Verses, see The Rushdie File and Imaginary
Homelands, the essay collection compiled during Rushdie’s time in hiding (New
York: Penguin, 1991). Also see Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s 2012 memoir (New
York: Random House), a lively personal account of the “Rushdie affair” during the
years leading up to and following Khomeini’s fatwa.
6 To Be Born Is to Die

modern, or postcolonial: a sea of theories and opinions. I will align myself

with those critics who do not perceive modernism as a period label
necessarily contradicting postcolonialism. Though students and scholars
may readily conceive of modernism as a set of dates beginning somewhere
around 1900 and ending soon after 1940, inevitably consisting of
Bloomsbury Group ‘greats’ such as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, the reality
is far less secure. Modernism is a route as much as it is a destination. In
New World Modernisms, Charles Pollard is concerned with the constant
opposition of modernism and postcolonialism to one another. Some critics,
Pollard notes, are more comfortable pitting modernism against its
descendent than acknowledging its enduring usefulness, its inability to end
with the 20th century.
Yet Pollard belongs to a class of critics who see modernism as helpful
in the development of frameworks which allow people to usefully describe
their experiences of alienation and disjunction: in other words, their
postcolonial experiences. Writing of T.S. Eliot, Pollard notes:
The complementarity of…modernism tends to get lost in all but the
most subtle of contemporary readings […]. Eliot conceives of tradition,
not as a struggle between the past and the present, between the community
and the individual…but as a collocation of the past and present, of the
community and the individual…in a new contingent whole. He knows that
these new wholes are only conventions, that they can never be fully
grasped from a single perspective, and that they always remain open to
change, but he believes that they remain important as the means by which
we shape perceptions of reality into meaningful patterns.21
For Pollard, modernism is a grounding force which develops perceived
wholes that may not actually exist, but which nevertheless facilitate human
perception and understanding, like a mnemonic device that is simply
constructed yet enables people to remember and to grasp structures of
great complexity. I will use modernism in this mnemonic sense in my own
study to explore how certain experimentally-warped time and spatial
constructs lead to the overcoming or challenging of linear time and stable
spatial or national identities in Rushdie’s novel. All of these constructs
enact an apocalyptic view of the diaspora through the kind of temporary
and contingent wholeness which Pollard describes.
However, if modernism offers a method of reaching toward apocalypse
through sublimity, so too does postmodernism, which has positioned itself
as a rival arbiter of the sublime. In the essay, “What is Postmodernism,”

21
Charles Pollard, New World Modernisms: T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau
Braithwaite (Charlottesville: University of Virginia UP, 2004), 26.
 Clara Eisinger 7

Jean-Francois Lyotard defines the postmodern as an early, “nascent”

element or impulse within the modern. He writes, “modern aesthetics is an
aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable
to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its
recognizable consistency, continues to offer the reader or viewer matter
for solace and pleasure.”22 The modern, Lyotard insists, is comforting,
stable, and ultimately untenable because its aesthetic consistency does “not
constitute the real sublime sentiment.”23 The sublime, he asserts, is “that
which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste…to
impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable”24—in other words, to reach
beyond specific aesthetic experiments and focal points into a realm in
which utter flux and inconsistency are all that a reader will encounter. This
process results in utter confusion, but also the sublime in its supposedly
“pure” form, devoid of aesthetic snobbery or over-determination. Yet flux
and inconsistency are themselves a form of consistency, closed down and,
as David Punter observes, distrusting of newness. He notes, “For the
postmodern, the new is always surprising and often catastrophic; the
question of interpretation is suspended in favour of a radical admission of
incomprehension.”25 Incomprehension becomes itself an “answer” and
another mode of comprehension: one which, for migrants, creates more
problems than it solves.
Postmodernism is ideal for battering down stability in a context in
which a firmly-moored identity and clear affiliation is always already
presumed. It is the strategy of a Western world attempting to deconstruct
its sureties; as Rushdie notes of travel, “adventuring is, these days…a
movement that originates in the rich parts of the planet and heads for the
poor.”26 A literary corollary of the wealthy man’s travels, postmodernism
uses purposeful nonsense to displace characters from their cozy clubs,
bevies of native servants, and tea-time chatter. Where D.H. Lawrence’s
Rupert Birkin asserts, “One should never have a home,”27 Thomas
Pynchon achieves a new level of uncertain absurdity with his Californian
characters’ search for an underground postal service. Yet such meaning-

22
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota UP, 1979), 81.
23
Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 81.
24
Ibid., 81.
25
David Punter, Modernity (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 2.
26
Salman Rushdie, “On Adventure” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticism 1981-1991 (New York: Granta, 1991), 224.
27
D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York: Bantam, 1996).
8 To Be Born Is to Die

destructive tactics—attempts to up-root the false confidences of security—

are not helpful to populations whose identities already are unstable: for
instance, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Indians living in Britain, or
Turkish guest workers in Germany, or Allie Cone’s Jewish parents living
wherever they will not encounter persecution. Such people cannot be
ethically told that they have no place in the world, no room left in the inn:
that they must be forced to stay into the same un-rooted state in which they
have always already dwelled.
Rushdie himself, after post-fatwa security issues left him constantly
searching for the next home-base, the next-rental house, the next set of
friends upon which to place his trust and support, became acutely
demoralized and depressed, searching for the type of grounding which he
had previously given his character Saladin Chamcha. Barred from India
both emotionally and physically—but never intellectually—he writes of
himself in the third-person: “Was it possible to be—to become good at
being—not rootless, but multiply rooted? Not to suffer from a loss of roots
but to benefit from an excess of them?...He needed to make an act of
reclamation of the Indian identity he had lost.”28 Instead of choosing to
stand unrooted, unconnected in a land of confusion, Rushdie decides
during his early writing career and post-fatwa years alike to reconnoiter
with his Indian self, embracing his heritage of a critical Islamic culture
while remaining wary of narrow-minded evangelism. He adheres also to
the “multiply-rooted” tradition of reasonable skepticism—earning him
great censure from more singly-rooted Iranian clerics, vehemently
fundamentalist British Muslims, and Labour Party members eager to
mollify their Rushdie-lambasting constituencies. Rushdie, though ever-
admiring of postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon29—desperate, even
not to fall asleep during a post-dinner conversation with him!—never quite
joined their ranks either. When faced with the need for protection, for
constant flight and hiding, barred from living in one permanent home, one
permanent place—the migrant condition magnified past the brink of
absurdity—Rushdie himself sought meaning, fought for sense and a home,
as so many immigrants do (see Mishra below).
His position is illustrative of the pitfalls of postmodernity, especially
its oft-alluded to homelessness, lack of stability/security and purposeful
attempts at befuddlement. More useful than postmodernism for those with
a migratory outlook, Melba Cuddy-Keane asserts, is a modernist

28
Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012),
54.
29
Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 362.
 Clara Eisinger 9

understanding of the self as a form of “global consciousness,”30 a synonym

for Rushdie’s “multiple-rootedness.” By grasping one’s own identity as
always-already related to the identities of others rather than incomprehensible
in relationship to others, Cuddy-Keane insists that a “transformative
[possibility]” arises,31 one in which “the self is resituated out in the world
of global flows,”32 or the self “itself” becomes diasporic. From the flux
and flow of an apparently postmodern world, one can nevertheless assume
a particular identity, however many taproots it has grown. This identity is
plural and postcolonial rather than confused and subsumed: a definitive
individual identity and flexible, migratory, subject to change.

What Migrants Want: Spivak’s “Location of Migrancy,”

Absent Endings, and the Intertextuality
of the New Modernism
The modern is not senile. It has not yet died, petrified, or become
brittle. As Pollard notes of Walcott and Brathwaite’s writing, “Attributes
…such as contingency of identity, the emphasis on cultural absence, and
making language visible, could fairly be characterized as postmodern, but
the general thrust of their work is best described as modernist because it
still aspires to create a provisional sense of cultural order or wholeness out
of a multiplicity of cultural sources.”33 A kind of “provisional” wholeness
appears out of what would otherwise be jumbled, tangled disorder. This
“wholeness” does not deny the presence of the sublime, which it will not
try to represent, and neither does it presume to dictate what that sublime
might be. Again, one must return to the figuration of modernism as a
mnemonic device. The sublime is for modernism a vehicle to an endpoint,
Pollard implies. This endpoint is provisional and apocalyptic in character
because it stops where the unknown or “cultural absence” begins and
ceases to answer the most perplexing of inquiries, only providing a road
down which one can travel to reach the answers—if indeed answers there
are.

30
Melba Cuddy-Keane, “Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,”
Modernism/Modernity 10.3 (2003): 540, accessed January 18, 2012,
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/modernism-
modernity/v010/10.3cuddy-keane.html.
31
Cuddy-Keane, Modernism, 545.
32
Ibid., 545-546.
33
Pollard, Modernisms, 39.
10 To Be Born Is to Die

Certainly, the answers towards which Rushdie hints are not always
comforting. The Verses does not answer Saladin’s question of why his
father smiles at death. Nor does it solve readers’ potential questions about
what happens to Saladin after he walks away from his home with Zeeny.
However, Saladin himself appears not to require this knowledge, taking
comfort from his mere presence at his father’s deathbed and his reunion
with Zeeny, drawing strength from the certainty of his love for these two
people, no matter where he has been in the past and no matter where he
will travel in the future. He enters a small cell of friendships and loves.34
Though Saladin’s experiences of sublimity are apocalyptic because they
are associated with an unknowable ending, with absence and with apparent
doubt, they nevertheless open him up to a future of self-confidence and
companionship—a “multiply-rooted” home—of understanding and an
acceptance of his Indian nationality. This understanding is projected
backwards through a firmer grasp of his past and present circumstances,
ushering in a new comprehension which arises because of his initial
confusion.
Home and understanding can thus be recovered by the bending of time
itself. Vijay Mishra, in Literature of the Indian Diaspora, identifies the
diaspora as a temporally redemptive movement. He asserts that when a
desirable future is projected onto the present rather than the past, thus
privileging the now, time is “turned back against itself in order that
alternative readings, alternative histories may be released.”35 Oftentimes,
migrants do not, Mishra suggests, consider their present circumstances, for
the past, with its dangling turnip of cultural unity, is too compelling, and
the future, with its promises of a return to an Edenic state, is too
distracting to be of much help. Saladin, however, discovers and unleashes
alternative readings of his own past, becoming a man of whom his father
can be proud, a man who is faithful to his Indian girlfriend instead of
desiring the emotionally distant and cloistered Pamela—a man who joins
the liberal/liberated Bombay Human Chain and finds within himself
discontinuities which he can finally, with great relief, accept and approve,
though they initially make him uncomfortable.
Views of time as unstable and malleable, able to be changed or
redeemed in the most empowering of ways, can make migrant
communities nervous. What these want most of all, Mishra notes, is
stability, continuity, and firm identity, a “wish to cling to ‘millenarian’

34
Michael Levenson indicates that many modernist poets and writers did the same
(Companion, 6).
35
Vijay Mishra, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic
Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2007), 213.
 Clara Eisinger 11

narratives of self-empowerment in which only the untranslated can

recapture a lost harmony.”36 Such a desire for “untranslated-ness,” when
denied, drives people and ethnic groups to the edge of a conceptual
precipice: even if a leader commands the act, nobody wants to be the first
to jump off, to abandon unified and homogenous notions of identity,
though these latter may prove beneficial. For instance, in the beginning of
his narrative, Saladin believes that stability, safety on the correct side of
the cliff, is what he wants as well: a teleological journey from Indian brat
to well-bred Englishman, no kinks and no distractions along the way.
However, Mishra asserts that Rushdie’s representation of a spatiotemporal
discontinuity which is continuously reclaimable, though kinky and strange,
is more effective than straightforward continuity (if less immediately
desirable) for the purposes of enabling immigrants to understand the
conditions in which they live. After all, they are always and forever
translated, their identities constructed as if from a dream (or a nightmare),
never pure or singular. Eventually, Mishra notes, Saladin realizes this one
truth: “It is…Saladin who is reborn and who accepts the need for
change.”37 In the process, he learns to stop living a lie that denies the
strangeness, brokenness, asymmetry, and intertextuality of existence and
instead attempts to craft all of these realities into a new coherence—a
coherence not initially visible, but nevertheless present.
The Verses itself, like its hero Saladin, is deeply intertextual in its
desire to push beyond the boundaries of a single work and to incorporate38
many works into its own body, to make discontinuity and its attendant
novelty its very substance even as it seeks out some form of stability.
Gayatri Spivak writes that, “once you have finished the phantasmagoric
book, the global slowly settles into the peculiar locale of migrancy.”39
What this location of migrancy is, Spivak believes, can only be discovered
when a migrant turns away from the dream of finding agency in one
nation,40 instead accepting the notion that one never belongs to a singular
nation or group, uncomplicatedly—and even if one does, one must still

36
Mishra, Indian Diaspora, 223.
37
Mishra, Indian Diaspora, 225.
38
“Incorporation” here does not imply assimilation, or conformism. Also, though I
do not discuss in detail here the works which Rushdie incorporates, these are
numerous and include Milton’s Paradise Lost, Joyce’s Ulysses and Portrait of the
Artist, Goethe’s Faust, The Arabian Nights, and many other, less immediately
significant texts.
39
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Reading the Satanic Verses,” Public Culture 2.1
(1989): 79-99, accessed March 20, 2012, Scribd, 84.
40
Spivak, Reading, 94.
12 To Be Born Is to Die

critique that odd space, which appears to be de-centered even when it is

not.41 Again, the idea of the “multiply-rooted” life reappears.42
Also, and more concretely, the location of migrancy is not only
discovered via a particular method, but is a substantial notion in its own
right, plural and conjoined. Spivak writes, “Literature is transactional. The
point is not the correct description of a book, but the construction of
readerships.”43 The most important aspect of a novel, Spivak asserts, is its
ability to build readerships and enable its readers to learn. Sometimes, this
process of learning enters strange terrain where people must explore
cultural transactions and intertextual conjunctions at the points at which
they cease to make sense, fail altogether, or require new terminology.
Simon Gikandi similarly attempts to construct a theory of the migrant
experience which is locally but globally contextualized through aporias
and Schroedinger’s cat-like absences. He describes England as a place of
“unclarified beginnings”44 and emphasizes the gaps present in Rushdie’s
narratives, some of which derive from the tautologies inevitable in
Rushdie’s work. Gikandi does not believe that Rushdie can ever escape
“the very normativities—nation and empire—that [he] seeks to negate.”45
Specifically, he notes that, “While the novel seems to destabilize such
properties as modern temporality, the space of the nation, and the
foundational moments of culture, its power of critique….also seems to be
dependent on such categories.”46 Though Rushdie subverts and attacks
colonialism, satirizing English fears concerning black immigrants and
metamorphosing his characters into awkward shapes, this very attack of
colonialism stems from a direct acknowledgement of its power.
Rushdie, according to Gikandi, grapples vigorously with his
antagonizing force. Gikandi writes, “the whole momentum of the novel, at
least until its moment of closure, is toward the transcendence of such
categories [as empire, nation, etc.].”47 While Gikandi insists that Rushdie
cannot actually transcend them, he does note that the “aporic moments and

41
Ibid., 84.
42
Importantly, there is a location of migrancy, as Spivak and Gikandi together
suggest. Where postmodern theory would posit that the location of migrancy is a
fallacy, nonexistent, they implicitly argue that it does exist, even if its position
changes and its exact whereabouts are often unknown.
43
Spivak, Reading, 87.
44
Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of
Colonialism (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), 205.
45
Gikandi, Englishness, 208.
46
Ibid., 209-210.
47
Ibid., 210.
 Clara Eisinger 13

narrative ellipses”48 in Rushdie’s novel draw close to doing so. Rushdie

gestures towards an Other, a so-called third option, a difference which
Gikandi terms “this moment of retour,”49 or a revisiting of the past which
causes characters to understand it differently and to overcome the
detrimental effects of categories in their own lives: whether the categories
of Indian boor versus English gentleman, ungrateful son versus
antagonistic father, or loyal true-love versus distant, unattainable beauty.
All of these categories must be refuted. But then, at the point at which they
are about to be refuted, the narrative itself must end, thus preempting
refutation and asserting a kind of sense.

Come Again: Apocalyptic Retour and Postcolonial

Modernism in SV
Gikandi poses the significance of the retour and its consequent gaps in
terms of a framework which might be described as apocalyptic in its
inability to definitively end. Gaps and aporias gesture toward apocalypse,
which is opaque and must be revisited, “retoured” in order for any
achievement of transparency to occur. Essentially, the modernist critic
William Franke defines apocalypse as constituting a “radical openness to
what is other than all that can be represented.”50 He elaborates, “The
unrepresentable source of making, alias poiesis, from which all
representations poetically emerge, cannot itself be represented as such, but
it can always, volcanically, act up and manifest itself anew…[it is a]
world-shattering, world-renewing event.”51 Volcanic rupture involves a
repetitive act of temptation indirectly manifested, “abid[ing] beyond the
reach of rhetoric, its other face, the dark side of its luminous truth.”52
Reaching for a shattering and impossible truth, narrative poesis ends at the
point where the unrepresentable meets representation, creating something
tangible. This tangible achievement is the spark of hopeful anticipation,
which moves forward by looking backward in a transformed way,
revitalizing the present rather than imposing the past upon it, and
attempting repeatedly to make the unrepresentable attainable by seeing its
effects rather than searching in vain for its causes or seeking to prove its

48
Ibid., 214.
49
Ibid., 223.
50
William Franke, Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic
Language (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009), 25.
51
Franke, Poetry, 25.
52
Ibid., 39.
14 To Be Born Is to Die

actual reality. Narrative poesis, with its apocalyptic source/origin, seeks to

renew understanding as a process, a recovery, and thus to create it anew.
Along these lines, Rushdie constantly evokes the unknown through the
known, eventually pushing the known into the territory of the unknown.
By taking the known realm of diaspora and pushing it to its logical
conclusion (complete scattering), he takes it beyond its theorized borders
into an ineffable, disorientated realm which none of his characters, or
Rushdie himself, can verbalize, despite their familiarity with some of the
very aspects of the realm which disorients them. Saladin, for instance, is
familiar with police abuse of lower-class immigrants, but has never
imagined that such abuse could happen to him. Gibreel knows that London
is a historical and quasi-magical city because of its ancient nature and
accompanying ghosts, but he never expected it to literally shift and change
beneath his feet. Apocalypse and sublimity appear within every gap in The
Verses and are the non-representable forms towards which all of Rushdie’s
attempts at categorical transcendence strive as well as the forms which
bizarre mutations and events assume. In the process of asking what is
possible in narrative through the negation of language itself, Rushdie
expands the boundaries of narrative possibility, opening up the
postcolonial novel as a form of philosophical and existential critique
which achieves its purpose by revealing what it cannot ultimately reveal in
the guise of the sublime. In his work, notably, the sublime assumes the
work of recovery, focusing its powers upon the freedom of the migrant
soul in an expanded existence which lacks the predeterminations and
narrow expectations of everyday society.
For William Franke such sublimity is a revelatory power which opens
up language itself. He writes, “Just what [the]…beyond of language is
cannot be said…In faith, we can repeat and thus, in some sense, enact or
enable the apocalyptic revelation that we cannot objectively know…This
is to open ourselves to the poetic process as a formative making and re-
making—but also a deformation and an unmaking.”53 For Franke, sublime
revelation is an opening experience, an encouraging and potentially life-
saving linguistic process which can allow dialogue and relationships
between communities to attain new heights of strength. It is expressed
poetically, through artistic forms and the knowledge they transmit, and
also through an aesthetic practice which encases ethnic migration and
therefore infects itself with it, spreading its migratory power of “modernist
incompletion”54 through everything it touches. It is an art formation—or

53
Ibid., 205.
54
Levenson, Modernism, 271.
 Clara Eisinger 15

deformation/distortion—made a vector for the significance of art,

migration, and community, an opening up of art itself which refuses to
classify or to limit what counts as migrant experience or great literature.

Repetition with a Difference: The Case for Originality

in Global Modernism
The modernist project, thus, never ended, and it continues today. In his
writings on Derek Walcott, Reed Way Dasenbrock sees expansive
modernist forces at work, noting Walcott’s willingness to embrace
apparently counterintuitive aesthetic techniques in a synergetic connection
between so-called “oppressors” and ostensible “oppressed.” Walcott,
Dasenbrock argues, views modernist aesthetic techniques as useful to his
own postcolonial projects rather than opposed to them: for Walcott no
contradiction exists between them, only correlation and correspondence.
Dasenbrock declares, “I think Walcott thinks Homer and Dante are great
writers…Walcott in turn aspires to write masterpieces and aspires to be a
great writer […]. There are no post-colonial writers worth reading who do
not have exactly the same commitment to hierarchy…as the now-
demonized modernists.”55 Walcott recognizes kindred spirits in the form
of his literary ancestors and wants to be like them; he understands the
electricity running between pieces of great writing and wants to become a
part of the current. While critics with an antipathy towards modernism
might worry that Walcott has been hijacked—that his desires and
aspirations have been overdetermined and hegemonically guided by the
West56—Dasenbrock asserts that this is clearly not the case, as Walcott
uses modernist epic techniques and allusions to guide his character Achille
to the shores of Africa and between different Caribbean islands.
Modernism is for Walcott only a starting point—his muse points in a
direction not like Pound or Eliot’s, no matter how much, as Dasenbrock
notes, the latter two men have inspired him. Eventually, he exceeds the
limitations of 1910s-1930s high modernism to achieve a different goal.
In many ways, Rushdie’s predicament is similar to Walcott’s: that of
an educated British man of minority background teaching under the

55
Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Why the Post in Post-Colonial is Not the Post in
Postmodern: Homer, Dante, Pound, Walcott,” in Ezra Pound and African
American Modernism, edited by Michael Coyle (Orono: National Poetry
Foundation, 2001), 120.
56
See also Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial 1890-1920
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), pages 21-22.
16 To Be Born Is to Die

auspices of entrenched Western power. How, some people might ask,

could he possibly maintain a “postcolonial” viewpoint in the midst of the
unashamedly colonial structures present in Ivy League universities? Of
course, if one has to ask this question, then one has seriously
underestimated Rushdie’s imaginative power. Artistic technique is only
ever a beginning marker, not an endpoint. It is mere technique, employed
in whichever direction its guiding mind chooses, and not a totalizing force.
It exceeds; it overreaches. As Andreas Huyssen notes, a focus upon the
aesthetic qualities of a work no longer possesses the negative connotations
it might once have had, since aestheticism is now more democratically
applied in Western culture and has always taken on various forms in other
cultures. Huyssen writes, “it is simply retrograde to claim that any concern
with aesthetic form is inherently elitist.”57 Preoccupation with the aesthetic
as a kind of all-encompassing snobbery is over. Postmodernists debated
this in the latter part of the 20th-century, but this is now the 21st century,
where sprawling ancient epics play on Indian television and scholars read
pulp South American literature as avant-garde (Huyssen). The world of
which Huyssen writes (as of 2002), is one in which high art and low art are
not oppositional energies but rather borrow from each other, sometimes
indiscriminately and at other times with great purpose. That Rushdie
borrows from modernist epic tradition—like Joyce’s Ulysses—and that he
distorts time and space—also like Ulysses, The Waste Land, the Cantos,
and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood—no longer implies that he allows these
earlier artists’ missions to supersede his own. He has his own purposes—
namely, to reveal the experiences of ethnic migration—and he shows
audiences what these experiences entail by stretching art and narrative to
their breaking points, to their utter limits, beyond which they may collapse
into the nothingness of infinity. In the process, he reveals the resolute
strength of stretched narrative time and space, which through their own
proliferations of confusion create a newly-synthesized form of sense. It is
a modernist sense, ushering out the last vestiges of postmodernism, unless,
of course, the latter can someday revive itself the way its “predecessor”
has.
Ultimately, The Satanic Verses is well-equipped to grapple with, to
synthesize and conjoin the elements of migrant life through its very use of
migratory sublimity conjoined with the aesthetic deformation of space and
time. It demonstrates that cultural foundations are more difficult,

57
Andreas Huyssen, “High/Low in an Expanded Field,” Modernism/Modernity 9.3
(2002): 368, accessed January 14, 2012, summary URL:
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/modernism-
modernity/v009/9.3huyssen.html.
 Clara Eisinger 17

changeable, and contextual than previously imagined, “rais[ing] wide-

ranging questions about the nature of identity in a mobile, multiple,
interconnected world.”58 These are questions that ultimately will never be
resolved so long as certain concepts and realms remain un-representable to
the artistic, human imagination. But they will always be worth asking,
embellishing upon, and even overriding with new inquiries, refusing
epistemological anarchy while reneging not at all on the promise of
generative power.

58
Gillian Gane, “Migrancy, The Cosmopolitan Intellectual, and the Global City in
The Satanic Verses,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48.1 (2002): 25, accessed
March 12, 2012, summary URL:
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/modern_fiction_s
tudies/v048/48.1gane.html.
 EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD:
THEORY OF EXHAUSTION AND THE QUESTION
OF IDENTITY

KEVIN CRYDERMAN

Early on in Woody Allen’s 1975 film Love and Death, a cinematic

parody of classic Russian literature, Boris Grushenko (Woody Allen) tells
the audience in voice-over that his father “owned a valuable piece of
land.” The next shot shows Boris’ grey-bearded ushanka-headed father
pull a tiny chunk of dirt with grass on it from under his shirt as Boris
qualifies that “True, it was a small piece, but he carried it with him
wherever he went.” A countershot shows a mustachioed man shouting
“Dmitri Pyotrovich, I would like to buy your land!” Boris’ father shouts
back, pointing defiantly to the piece of earth in his hand, “This land is not
for sale! Some day I hope to build on it!” Boris explains in voice-over that
his father “was an idiot, but I loved him.” Despite the broadly comic tone,
however, the moment nevertheless captures well identity’s deep
connection to and fight over a piece of turf, a literal or figurative chunk of
concrete, mud or sand connected to a sense of belonging that we ‘carry
with us’ wherever we go. Regardless of how meager a scrap we own,
identity is ‘ours’ and it must survive for we hope to build on it.
Yet “post post-identity” discourse (a.k.a. “anti-identity,” “post-
ethnicity” or “post-postmodern”) calls into question these assumptions of
identity as a central organizing principle. Post post-identity is an incisive
and valuable challenge to the primacy of socially ascribed identities or
subject positions as operative terms. In a review in American Quarterly of
Walter Benn Michaels’ The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of
History entitled “Post-Post-Identity,” Michael Millner encapsulates the
heart of a theoretical trend towards post-postmodernism, specifically on
the question of identity:

If the 1990s were characterized by a rich and sophisticated

reconceptualization of identityas performative, mobile, strategically
essential, intersectional, incomplete, in-process, provisional, hybrid,
 Kevin Cryderman 19

partial, fragmentary, fluid, transitional, transnational, cosmopolitan,

counterpublic, and above all, culturalthe new millennium has been
frequently marked by a sense of exhaustion around the whole project of
identity.1

Indeed, theorists such as Ross Posnock, Walter Benn Michaels, Paul

Gilroy, Amanda Anderson and Timothy Brennan unearth strange and
problematic bed-fellows in the logic of identity within the political
landscape. What I call “theory of exhaustion” is a particular trend since the
turn-of-the-millenniuma growing exhaustion with both cultural pluralism
and post-identity theories of the “subject.”
Often grounded in a rhetoric of authenticity, cultural pluralism
embraces difference and valorizes marginalized cultural traditions while
maintaining a suspicion of universalism as a hegemonic legerdemain
based on synecdoche: a particular social sector claiming to stand in for the
whole of society. While any “camp” is never cut and dried, theorists
operating within the general frame of multiculturalism or cultural
pluralismwhich is often the ground for an identity politics typified by
the Combahee River Collective Manifesto2would include Patricia Hill
Collins, Alice Walker, Hortense Spillers, Dana Nelson, Robyn Wiegman
and Russ Castronovo. In Identity and the Failure of America, John
Michael describes pluralist critique as one that “dissolves the implicitly
universalizing and abstracting tendencies of the nation into the
particularities of race, gender, class, and ethnicity.”3
Meanwhile, using but critically interrogating the concept of universality,
post-identity approaches, which emerge from post-structuralist attention to
discourse, iterability and contingency, immanently critique previous
formulations of coherent, autonomous and self-transparent individuals.
These approaches reconceptualize identity as a category through dissections
of subjectivization, positionality and normativity. Post-identity theory is

1
Michael Millner, “Post Post-Identity,” in review of The Shape of the Signifier:
1967 to the End of History, by Walter Benn Michaels, and So Black and Blue:
Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism, by Kenneth W. Warren. American
Quarterly 57.2 (Jun 2005): 541-54.
2
This manifesto is a 1977 statement from a collective of Black feminists to
articulate four main aspects of black feminism: “(1) the genesis of contemporary
Black feminism; (2) what we believe, i.e., the specific province of our politics; (3)
the problems in organizing Black feminists, including a brief herstory of our
collective; and (4) Black feminist issues and practice.”
3
John Michael, Identity and the Failure of America: From Thomas Jefferson to the
War on Terror (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 2.
20 Everybody Wants to Rule the World

the general category for theorists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques

Derrida, Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Eve
Sedgwick, Norma Alarcon, Christopher Newfield, Avery Gordon, Diana
Fuss, Donna Haraway, Seyla Benhabib, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri:
not “after” identity per se but a shift in attention to a vigilantly critical
relationship to the category of identity that might help to remap
multiculturalism and its essentializing tendencies. An example in action
would be post-feminist or post-racial politics, which do not abandon the
categories but place them under erasure.
While John Michael divides the field of American studies into two
irreconcilable “camps,” cultural pluralism and post-identity, I have set out
three main ones to clarify the distinction between “post-identity” and “post
post-identity” and do not find their divisions hopelessly intractable. Here,
the third camp of “post post-identity” within the “theory of exhaustion”
shows a weary contempt for the sameness/difference axis of identity,
emphasizes philosophical pragmatism, disagreement and argument (about
beliefs, ideologies and practices), and problems of economic inequality
rather than diversity. “Post post-identity” (or “anti-identity”) theories extol
universality and censure identitarian logic, whether as fixed or fluid, and
claim that it reinscribes all politics as about identity. Theory of exhaustion
tends to hold that cultural pluralism merely reinscribes frozen taxonomies
of identity (mantras of race, class, gender et al.) while post-identity’s
ritualistic horse floggings of the Cartesian cogito seem now to be more
dogmatic, canonical and orthodox than fresh or innovative.
Akin to John Barth’s “literature of exhaustion” and “replenishment,”
theory of exhaustion aims to revivify and expand the imaginative scope of
the field of debate through self-reflexive attention to the apparent “used-
up-ness” of academia and its byzantine jargon. Passionately arguing for
others to share their weariness with “identity” and its political pitfalls,
theory of exhaustion tends to operate as a project of reclamation for earlier
critical, philosophical and political frameworks that the recent academic
orthodoxy of “theory” had marginalized, such as radical Marxism; the
public sphere; civic participation; communicative ethics; intentionalism;
philosophical pragmatism; universalism; and specific versions of
cosmopolitanism. Theory of exhaustion also seeks to shift attention to the
growing overall economic inequality that the politics of identity, both
cultural pluralism’s embrace of difference and post-identity’s attention to
the contingency of subject positions, has obscured. Taking a cue from the
Love and Death anecdote, I propose that it might be productive here to
begin by looking at the debates in rather broad, even cartoonishly simple,
 Kevin Cryderman 21

terms to look at tensions within the reigning “common sense” understandings

of what “identity” means for politics and culture.
Arguing that post-identity’s anti-essentialism makes no sense and
ultimately creates other forms of essentialism through a commitment to the
subject position, the “post post-identity” tendency can be found in
theoretical constellations involving the public sphere, cosmopolitanism,
universalism, planetary humanism and philosophical pragmatism such as
Walter Benn Michaels, Ross Posnock, Timothy Brennan, Amanda
Anderson and Paul Gilroy (especially Against Race’s critique of the
identarian logic around race). For instance, post post-identity theorists read
“the poor” as a condition to be dissolved through redistribution rather than
as an identity category to be lauded as authentic. These thinkers tend to
encourage a marketplace of ideas and an ethics of argument as part of a
wider universalizing argument about beliefs, values and practices,
criticizing the idea of parochial cultural practices as simply “different
languages” that must all be respected because they ensure the survival of a
particular identity. Here, argument, rather than identity, emerges the
central organizing principle for understanding human relationships.
In Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern
Intellectual, Ross Posnock self-consciously writes “after identity politics,”
or at least its ebbing, and articulates a version of cosmopolitan universalism.
The universal here operates “not in nostalgic defiance but chastened,
neither positing a ‘view from nowhere’ nor seeking to bleach out ethnicity
and erect a ‘color-blind’ ideal.”4 Via William James’ philosophical
pragmatism, Posnock’s universalism investigates whether “culture has no
color,” building a project that explores the “conundrum black intellectual”
from within a “moment of the ‘unguaranteed’ and ‘unscripted,’ as the
epoch of postmodern tribalism wanes.”5
Amidst this supposed waning of “postmodern tribalism,” Paul Gilroy
sees opportunity in a “crisis of raciology.” Against Race seeks to un-fix
racism by loosening the grip of all cultural attachment to the idea of “race”
through the potentialities of a “planetary humanism”: through globalization,
race will eventually become as trivial as hair color. Gilroy argues that the
“specious ontologies” of ‘race,’ which render human accidentals profound,

4
Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern
Intellectual (Cambridge Massachusetts and London England: Harvard University
Press, 1998), 21.
5
Posnock, Color, 47.
22 Everybody Wants to Rule the World

“should be awarded no immunity from prosecution.”6 Pointing to the

important role of the body, Gilroy posits that the

“history of racism is a narrative in which the congruency of micro- and

macrocosm has been disrupted at the point of their analogical intersection:
the human body. The order of active differentiation that gets called ‘race’
may be modernity’s most pernicious signature.”7

Even though race has little-to-no genetic justification and “identity

politics” is often used as a derogatory term, race remains as a spectral
“afterimage” shaped by world media conglomerates.8
Amanda Anderson in The Way We Argue Now (2006) seems to agree
with Gilroy when she contests the “prevalent skepticism about the
possibility or desirability of achieving reflective distance on one’s social
or cultural positioning.”9 Anderson offers an “ethics” and “culture of
argument,” “the discursive practices and habits that underpin the
unfinished project of modernity and the evolving institutions of liberal
democracies.”10 Operating within a self-critical Habermasianism rather
than Gilroy’s utopian “planetary humanism,” she realizes that no one can
“argue [identity] out of existence” but nevertheless insists that “the
dominant paradigms within literary and cultural studies have had an
adverse effect on the fostering of public-sphere argument precisely insofar
as identity has come to seem the strongest argument of all.”11
In books such as The Shape of the Signifier and The Problem with
Diversity, Walter Benn Michaels concurs. He polemically critiques a
shared logic underlying disparate positions that makes for strange
bedfellows in the sociopolitical sphere, such as essentialists and anti-
essentialists both assuming the subject position should form the locus for
debates about social transformation. Michaels envisions a rational
marketplace of ideas where the terms of the conversation are universal,
such as overall economic disparities rather than the portions for each
identity group. Michaels warns his readers of the dangerous logic of
“difference without disagreement,” pointing out cultural and political

6
Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line
(Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 53.
7
Gilroy, Against Race, 53.
8
Ibid., 37.
9
Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Culture of Argument
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1.
10
Anderson, Argue Now, 1, 6.
11
Ibid., 5, 17.
 Kevin Cryderman 23

conversations where groups all talk past each other with their own
Lyotardian phrase regimens but have no basis for a system of argument.
He notes that each group lauds diversity but favors its own cultural
tradition. Yet, if cultures are values, it makes “no sense for us to think that
cultures other than our own should survive.”12 This paradox suggests there
are universal criteria by which “we” might all judge practices, beliefs,
values and ideologies. Critiquing the myopia of identity, he emphasizes a
shared conversation of a universal public sphere.
Timothy Brennan likewise supports the public practice of a post post-
identity democratic politics of civic participation, critiquing poststructuralism,
postcolonialism, cultural pluralism, identity-construction and bio-power in
ways that resonate with the others’ healthy suspicion of “identarian logic”
and its balkanizing effects. In Wars of Position Brennan interrogates the
“chilling of academic dissent” within the “middle way” of the academy’s
jargonized “theory” of the 1980s and 1990s, arguing that

“against neotraditionalism, theory found its answer in irony. In a polarized

age, it declared that polarization be abolished. This aleatory uncertainty it
turned outnot unlike the American pluralism it mirrorssimply ended
the debate by foreclosing it.”13

Brennan adds a productive twist to theory of exhaustion’s positions when

he argues that “belief systems as political outlooks are to some extent
cultural and inherited,” and a “culture of belief” is as much an identity as
race, religion, class, gender or sexuality.14
Indeed, I would take this further: all identity categories operate as
cultures of belief/argument, including those which aim to drive a stake
through the beating heart of identity. The idiosyncratic experience of
having an identity or argument at all necessitates an affiliative connection,
at least in imagination, with others who appear to share that sense of “self”
or are similarly positioned. Identities also form and operate via explicit
and implicit arguments waged in the heterogeneous collision of discourses
and positions that recode belief (even “universal” arguments) as
inheritance. One is not simply “white,” “male” and “conservative” without
any sense about what that might mean in a particular cultural-historical

12
Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History,
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 48-9.
13
Timothy Brennan, Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right,
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 33, 38.
14
Brennan, Wars, xii.
24 Everybody Wants to Rule the World

location, even amidst a myopically obtuse experience of being a “neutral”

“normal” “independent.”
At both conscious and unconscious levels (since the unconscious is
also social), identity is always a lively negotiation even if one is
completely ignorant that it is: cultures and sub-cultures of belief jostle
with others within a pluralistic sociopolitical landscape. Embodied
perspective is the site of intersection for the idiosyncratic and collective
(i.e. the microscopic and macroscopic) in a particular way and does not
exist outside of specific regulative frameworks and their constellations of
arguments. For instance, Italian immigrants to America may have a wide
variety of skin tones from light to dark yet all willingly embrace the larger
category of “White” rather than “Black”that is, of course, until the
relationship between race and power reverses polarities. On the other
hand, middle-class Brazilians who emigrate to the United States may be
quite shocked to experience themselves now coded as “Latino,” “Spanish,”
“Hispanic,” or “Mexican” within the American national regulative
framework since they speak Portuguese and had a firm self-image of being
“white” in Brazil. Social construction is not merely of a category such as
“gender” or “race” but operates performatively through idiosyncratic
subjects, who bolster their identity-readings (kinds of arguments or
hypotheses) of fellow idiosyncratic subjects with supplemental evidence
that guides expectations and narrows the interpretation, such as name,
accent or cultural practices. With changes in accent or setting, it is possible
a light brown-skinned person with jet black hair could potentially be coded
as Indian, Cuban, Lebanese, Mexican, Spanish, Israeli, Brazilian,
Portuguese, Italian…
In his desire for rational disagreements that “transcend” identities via
an abstract and universal subject, Michaels problematically equivocates
diversity amongst identity categories (such as races) with the diversity
within each category: two different senses of what “cultural pluralism”
might mean. Indeed, affiliation is both chosen and not, but in both cases
the affiliative connection becomes recoded through the logic of
inheritance, which involves any imagination by idiosyncratic subjects (or
done for idiosyncratic subjects) that they are part of a “people.” Thus, two
“white” female academics in lovewho strenuously critique racial
essentialism in their published workmay feel deeply that their adopted
African-American baby girl should be in touch with her “heritage,” both in
terms of the African-American community and the African continent. At
the heart of his argument, Michaels lambasts the rhetoric of both survival
and inheritance for its own sakecultural, linguistic, biological. In a truly
egalitarian universe of cultural parity, Michaels contends, “Why should
 Kevin Cryderman 25

anyone care if a [particular] culture survives?” Yet, in the relationship

between idiosyncratic subjects (i.e. concrete, specific human beings vs. the
abstract category of the subject) and collectivities, the logic of inheritance
dictates cultures of belief/argument in the same way as any identity
category: capitalism, liberalism, socialism, religious fundamentalism, etc.
Argument-identities form alliances of belonging by options within a
horizon of cultural-historical expectations and possibilities, with degrees
of freedom for “choosing,” via degrees of shared understanding of what
“inheritance” means. Explicit arguments within the politics of identity
merely amplify and foreground the idiosyncratic subject’s quotidian
negotiation between particularity and collectivity. Affiliative social
networks connect idiosyncratic subjects through hubbed networks-in-
motion within the social-political-economic sphere in ways beyond “face-
to-face” or “face-to-Facebook” interaction or conscious political alliances
such as marches, rallies or online activism. Based in particular tastes,
preferences and values, the idiosyncratic subject’s life history and
quotidian existence perform an implicit argument about what the category
means that generates an affiliative network of like-minded idiosyncratic
subjects.
Post post-identity approaches highlight the link between “difference”
with “disagreement” rather than “difference” with “identity,” but I would
counter that identity and argument are inextricable because of the
idiosyncratic way each subject and “user group” takes up a relationship to
generalized categories of understanding, including those that are pitched as
“universal.” The universal is not a timeless and eternal sphere for judging
all that is “best” but rather a culturally and historically specific claim to
broad generality within conflictual social fields. And thus, there seems to
be a problem with post post-identity methodology, which involves projects
for reclamations of critical-philosophical traditions from the past that have
informed our current place within the present academy but have been
forgotten or marginalized: radical Marxism; the public sphere and
communicative ethics; intentionalism; philosophical pragmatism;
universalism, etc. These marginalized critical traditions are useful because
they present alternate ways of thinking that challenge the reigning
theoretical orthodoxy in the academy, including its doctrinal reverence for
certain kinds of “theory” and their doctrinal texts (Derrida, Foucault, etc.).
I agree with post post-identity here: much can be charted in terms of
alternate future directions by revisiting the marginalized or forgotten past.
But, to extend Michaels’ comments about cultural practices, languages
and identities, one might ask “why should we care if any of these past
theoretical approaches survives?” Michaels posits that all languages are
26 Everybody Wants to Rule the World

essentially equal since no one ever argues that one language is “better”
than another for each serves the needs of its users. Yet, many collective
identities argue that their language is the best or the only one that could
express what they want to express, such as the sacred texts that were
forbidden from being translated for centuries (for example, the Vedas and
the Qur’an). Is this only a case of protecting an identity? In these kinds of
sociocultural tensions, Michaels also downplays the interchange between
languages and their cultural or philosophical traditions as ways of seeing
and inhabiting the world that are not directly translatable into other
languages but are productive in their very collision and particularity.
Eliding translation issues with a focus on universality, Michaels presents a
sphere of ideas detached from both texts in a specific language and the
critical and aesthetic traditions in which they emerged, not to mention the
actual idiosyncratic subjects who have deep emotional and intellectual
investments in those ideas as part of their identities. As Jeffrey Tucker
points out in relation to Michaels’ argument about Octavia Butler’s
Xenogenesis, Michaels “fails toor, rather, [he] chooses not toconsider
the extent to which the trilogy participates in a tradition of African-
American letters.”15 Indeed, traditions in literature and language help
establish relationships between idiosyncratic subjects in ways that produce
transformation through the negotiation of difference since there can be
engagement with traditions and languages at various degrees removed
from “people like us” in both the present and the past. I agree with
Michaels that the post-historicist idea of remembering a past one did not
experience is illogical. Yet a concept such as Toni Morrison’s “re-
memory” in Beloved, for instance, involves an important compassionate
and sympathetic connection with history through imagination that also
informs the negotiation with the diversity of the present. Both within and
between categories of cultural intelligibility, the negotiation with difference
is part of a critical self-spectatorship, even if the difference is simply a
mediated (and illogical) experience of idiosyncrasy or collective
belonging.
Each idiosyncratic subject does not define the terms upon which s/he
emerges into a raced, classed, gendered et al. identity but nevertheless
forms a highly particularized relationship to the terms of the debate around
what each category means within any given cultural-historical location.
The concrete generalization that forms the idiosyncrasy is not a reason to
abandon “identity” as a useful category, however. The idiosyncrasy

15
Jeffrey Tucker, “‘The Human Contradiction’: Identity and/as Essence in Octavia
E. Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy,” Yearbook of English Studies 37.2 (2007): 172.
 Kevin Cryderman 27

remains but also takes place within social networks. Shared

understandings of a particular contingent category and sub-categories (e.g.
raceÆAfrican-AmericanÆcosmopolitan intellectual) generate the affiliative
connections of a “user group” for each category that is a social network
recoded as an inherited sub-tradition, which then negotiates its own place
within larger regulative frameworks for belonging such as the “African-
American community,” “global blackness,” “human rights” or “cosmopolitan
universalism.” Rather than conversations based on an imagination of an
abstract and universal subject magically scrubbed of particularity,
idiosyncratic and collective identities inflect the sites from which these
debates become articulated. Argument-identity categories cannot exist
outside of regulative frameworks that condition expectations about what
the particular “difference” means for the idiosyncratic subject’s experience
of that difference. All idiosyncratic subjects within a putative “totality,”
such as nation, not only exist at the tension between generalization and
particularization but participate, willingly or not, with the nation’s
discourses about any given category.
Literary and philosophical traditions emerge within and between
specific languages or dialecticsthe productive collision that Bakhtin
calls heteroglossia, which is anything but language users operating in
separate worlds and respecting the difference of each other’s phrase
regimens.16 The very collision of imaginations in the encounter between
idiosyncratic subjects and a linguistically-encoded tradition can produce
critical self-spectatorship. Again, the point is not just how languages
operate within a speech community but across speech communities, even
within a language such as English: the very failures, struggles and
breaches of translation provoke critical dilation. Across languages,
scholars who want to study Abhinavagupta, the 10th–11th century Hindu
ĝaiva philosopher, for instance, must learn Sanskrit. If this language dies,
so goes as well the expansive possibilities for a deep engagement with an
invaluable comparative tradition.
Each of these traditions has its own particular way of thinking about
and inhabiting the world as well as a specific perspective, located within
its cultural-historical moment, on what is truly “universal.” Yet, over the
course of history, many critical and literary texts have been found not to be
the “best” theoretical or artistic approaches within the universalizing
appeals court of the academic canon. However, sometimes they are
rediscovered. If this had been a complete “cultural Holocaust,” a term

16
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, translated and edited by Michael
Holquist (USA: University of Texas Press, 1981).
28 Everybody Wants to Rule the World

Michaels ridicules, then these texts and traditions would have been lost
forever in the abyss, drowned out by the vision of what a particular
cultural-historical location (e.g. let’s say the late 1980s) claimed were the
most compelling ideas, values, practices and ideologies. Instead of simply
ideas within a disinterested and fully rational conversation, texts and
concepts remain within the culture through an iterative investment of
psychic and emotional energy for or against them. Particular arguments
and aesthetics become part of an idiosyncratic subject and collectivity in
the experience of identity, which post post-identity theories marginalize in
favor of a completely rational learning of knowledge. The passionate
attachment of ideas to identity, a “culture of belief,” ensures a productive
diversity of available options. Ideas that we now think are “stupid,”
“outdated” or “wrong”because, for instance, they were part of a
previous historical framecould be valuable since they both inform where
“we” are now and can act as resources for rethinking and immanently
critiquing our own era’s sensus communis.
These issues play out in allegorical terms in an episode of the cartoon
series South Park called “Ginger Kids.”17 Here, Eric Cartman delivers a
class presentation that is a vitriolic diatribe against “Gingerkids,” who
have red hair, freckles and pale skin. This incurable “disease” of
“gingervitis” occurs because these children were, Cartman flatly posits,
born without souls. Arguing that everybody knows but won’t admit that
Gingerkids “creep us out” and “make us sick to our stomachs,” he shouts
“Aw! Sick! Gross!” and “Aw! Nasty! Yuck!” at pictures of them. And like
vampires, they are not able to walk around in the day. “Ahhh…” The class
is convinced by his impeccable logic. When Kyle dissents, pointing out
that he is red-haired and can walk in the sun, Cartman counters that Kyle
is member of a sub-genus without pale skin and freckles known as
“DAYWALKERS.” After class, Kyle calls Cartman a “stupid supremist
asswipe” and sets out to disprove his theory, countering with a
presentation of his own on the genetic inheritance of red hair, freckles and
light skin: solid DNA evidence that concludes with a point about “the
melanins which control the pigment in all of our skins.” Kyle’s
presentation receives a tepid response from the class, including the
teacher, Mrs. Garrison (a post-op transsexual), who calls it a “little bit dry
and sciencey for my tastes.” When the ever-enthusiastic Butters tells Kyle
that his speech was “very informative,” Cartman’s response is that it is
“informative if you want to die,” reminding everyone that Kyle is half-

17
South Park, “Ginger Kids,” episode no. 11, season 9 (first broadcast November
9, 2005, by Comedy Central), directed and written by Trey Parker.
 Kevin Cryderman 29

Ginger himself and that Judas, who “got Jesus killed,” was a Ginger:
“Make no mistake, Gingerkids are evil.” Despite Kyle’s efforts,
Gingerkids quickly become outcasts, targets of widespread prejudice and
scorn.
To teach Cartman a lesson about what Kyle calls “hate speech,” Kyle,
Stan and Kenny sneak into Cartman’s room during the night and secretly
transform him into a Gingerkid while he is sleeping: skin bleach, hair
coloring and Henna freckles. Now an outcast Ginger, despite his
exhortations that “I’m still me inside,” Cartman establishes the Ginger
Separatist Movement to promote “Red Power” since he is “sick and tired
of being discriminated against” and being thought of as “genetically
inferior.” Staging a rally at the local airport Hilton, Cartman’s tone quickly
shifts from a plea for compassion, that Gingers are “people, with feelings,”
to a familiar exceptionalist refrain that Gingers are “the chosen people, the
chosen race.” He claims “the only way to fight hate is with more hate,”
which includes beating up a little girl starring in Annie who is not a “true
Ginger.”
On Cartman’s orders, the Gingerkids plan to exterminate all the non-
Gingers, part of Führer Cartman’s vision of a world where “there is no
hate because everyone is Ginger.” After all, he’s not going to live his life
as a “Goddamned minority.” Cartman sets up his genocidal plan: throwing
all non-Gingers into a lava pit in the conference room at the airport Hilton.
Kyle is the first slated to die, and he whispers in Cartman’s ear the
shocking secretCartman is not really a Ginger. Realizing he is in danger
of being killed by his own movement, Cartman quickly tries to convince
the bloodthirsty spectators that he just had an epiphany. Everyone should
“learn to live together” in peace. The episode ends as Cartman leads a
sing-along: “Hand in hand we can live together/Ginger or not, we’re all
the same/Black or White, Brown or Red/We shouldn’t kill each other, cuz
it’s lame.”
Provided interpretation is not simply reduced to the figurative level,
allegory as a mode is particularly useful here for the question of race,
which is itself a sustained metaphor that connects idiosyncratic subject to
larger categoriesa “dangerous trope,” as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls it.
Indeed, South Park’s satirical allegory is broadly comic but nevertheless
functions as a nexus of interpretations that reveals an underlying dynamic
of identity. A cartoon version of a cultural pluralist might argue here that
the episode points to the dangers of racial and cultural intolerance, a
message (cue piano) that Stan articulates just before a crowd of Gingers
with creepy frozen expressions stalk and abduct him: “You know,
Cartman is an uncaring, bigoted, intolerant asshole, but I have to admit, I
30 Everybody Wants to Rule the World

did have my own prejudices about Gingers. I think we all need to realize
that everyone is different in one way or another, and we shouldn’t be
threatened by those differences.” Barring the extermination plan, of
course, Gingers created a laudable pride movement, initially just engaging
in a “counter-hegemonic” (“Sick! Gross! Jargon!”) activism to increase
visibility and raise awareness about the problems of discrimination and
hierarchy within a multicultural landscape.
Still, cartoon post-identity theorists might critique the notion of Ginger
“authenticity” in the first place, speech-acting that there’s nothing essential
about Gingerness: identity is performative, and even the body cannot exist
in a pre-discursive realm since it is also a coded text.
Theory of exhaustion might chime in that Cartman simply magnifies a
violence inherent in the system of “identarian logic” and that it doesn’t
matter what “side” Cartman is on, against or with the Gingers. The Red
Power movement and planned genocide is merely a reductio ad absurdum
of the politics of identity’s default stance of the subject position within
cryptonormative logics of representation. Why is Cartman an automatic
and instant expert speaking from/about Redness, for instance? The point is
that all racial identities, actually or strategically essential, amplify
accidental differences that are as trivial as hair color into a frozen
hierarchy inherent in racialist thinking. The problem in the first place is to
define and code any identities as meaningful indicators of an automatic
community that, in pseudo-solidarity, must remain authentic to itself and
fight for turf within the crowded sociocultural landscape. Instead, within
provisional and multiple affiliations, the terms of the debate should be
about universal practices, values and ideologiesnot who we are but what
we do, argue and believe.
The “Ginger Kids” allegory serves all of these interpretations because
it points to the conflictual process underlying the interdependent
relationship between idiosyncratic subjects and collective identities.
“Ginger” as a meaningful collective identity emerges at the site of
contestation between the perpetrators and the recipients of a fearful and
unjust differential treatment. Hypothetically, if there had been widespread
and systematic discrimination against Gingers historically in America,
there would have been a long and vibrant tradition of Red culture. The
category of Ginger might have perpetuated itself through segregation in
culture, economics and procreationwith varying degrees of “choice” and
“preference.” “Ginger” as a term within the social field would also
continue to inflect social expectations and experience, serving as a marker
for collective identity, cultural expression and political mobilization
against racism long after most, including Gingers, realized the Ginger
 Kevin Cryderman 31

category is a fictional typology within a continuum of differences. Indeed,

ironically, although the episode parodies hate-mongering and intolerance,
it actually sparked widespread teasing of so-called “ginger-kids,” coming
to public attention in the news media through a Facebook group (since
removed by Facebook) called “National Kick A Ginger Day,” beginning
in 2009. The “holiday” resulted in countless incidences of attacks on red-
haired schoolchildren both in North America and abroad. At the same
time, a YouTube poster named “CopperCab” became well-known with his
vehement rants against the teasing and mockery about being a “ginger” he
experienced at school.
Here the “Ginger Kids” allegory points to a structuring dynamic of
difference and identity. It doesn’t matter what content identity is built on:
DNA, the lack of a soul, vampirism, the nation, or a culture of belief,
arguments and practices within a theoretical, philosophical, religious,
aesthetic or political tradition. Content is always elusive and contingent
since all identities operate through a myopic imagined relationship to
“people like us.” Indeed, the most biting humor of the episode emerges
from a simple irony of plot and character: Cartman’s perpetration of
injustice emerges because he fails to identity with and have empathy for
Gingers and then, a day later, when he is a Ginger, has only hate for non-
Gingers. Both before and after his “race change” operation, his arguments
inscribe a passionate logic of justification for an attachment to a particular
position that fights for a universalizing vision of a world created in its own
image.
Thus we are left with the question of the universal. Idiosyncratic and
collective identity in relation to the universal is perhaps visible only
through the effects it has on things around it, like the super-massive black
holes that astrophysicists have discovered reside at the center of every
galaxy. The massive gravitational pull keeps each galaxy in place but also
looms as a spectre of potential annihilation for every particular solar
system within it. In a range of cosmic structures from the microscopic to
the macroscopic, the universal may not be what scholars or political
movements make explicit claims to within competing universalisms but all
of the unacknowledged and unspoken agreements out of which difference
and disagreement emerge. Hence, each cultural-historical location will
have its own version of what this transcultural agreement is, and each
identity claims a tiny piece of turf that is not for sale. Here I am doubtful
that one’s values, beliefs and ideologies are things that can be simply
dispassionately argued about but, rather, cut to the core of identity and
must work outward through embodied critical self-interrogation. Each
person is the center of the universe. All of the galaxies maintain separate
32 Everybody Wants to Rule the World

spheres of circulation, occasionally crashing into each other or burning up

with a fiery death, but the basic material of existence that everyone shares
may be tiny filaments of energy or experience in multiple dimensions.
Sucking in particularity but radiating out tiny moments of idiosyncrasy in
the flux of life, the universal (or simply general) may help us all connect
and share stories with, sing to, listen to, make love to, argue with, and play
with each other in the specificity of our experience. The alternative
involves a mutual destruction of one by the other via the lava pit, and I
would argue instead that “hand in hand we can live together” and “we
shouldn’t kill each other, cuz it’s lame.”
 WE HAVE NEVER BEEN GENDERED:
THE POSTCONTEMPORARY CASE OF JULIA
WARD HOWE’S HERMAPHRODITE

KIMBERLY ENGBER

It is the nonlinguistic that matters just as much as the capabilities of the

higher animals—the silence, the stare, the gesture, the reflex. It is also the
inhumanity of language, the arts, and social forms as such, their evolution
as autopoetic systems—that elude the control of their supposed "creators."1
—W.J.T. Mitchell

The final scenes of Julia Ward Howe's The Hermaphrodite raise more
questions than readers generally expect from a story’s denouement. A
physician "closetted" with the protagonist Laurent’s friends, the brother
and sister Berto and Briseida, takes questions about the difficult medical
case presented to him.2 Berto starts by describing his close companion as
"the poetic dream of the ancient sculptor, more beautiful, though less
human, than either man or woman.” As art, Laurent’s body could express
something beyond the real. But appreciation for Laurent’s aesthetic
qualities does not help Berto understand his friend.

“Tell us, learned Medicus,” Berto implores, “he cannot be an exact

equation between the sexes, one or the other must predominate in his
nature—tell us, does the patient seem to you most masculine or most
feminine?"

Perhaps Julia Ward Howe suspects that her readers also have been asking
this question and waiting for a final revelation. Resisting the authority

1
W.J.T. Mitchell, “Foreword,” in Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse
of Species and Posthumanist Theory, by Carey Wolfe (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2003).
2
Julia Ward Howe, The Hermaphrodite, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2004), 194.
34 We Have Never Been Gendered

vested in him, the doctor responds with a question: "How have you already
decided for yourselves?" Not have you but how have you made your
determination, the doctor and the author wonder, emphasizing the method
by which we come to believe that we know. How we know Laurent
depends on what we already believe is true about men and women and
about our sexual selves. Howe gives the last word in the argument to the
doctor who “gravely” pronounces Laurent “rather both than neither” sex.3
Medical science supports aesthetic understanding, and if we turn, like
Berto does, to science to confirm social distinctions, we are disappointed.
The division of the sexes, one of the primary signifying systems of the
nineteenth century, is undermined. But to what end? Because Howe never
finished her novel, or, if she did complete a manuscript, the complete
version has been lost or destroyed, there is no end to this experiment. It
hovers between the nineteenth century when it was written and the twenty
first century when it was first published.
In the following argument, I briefly consider several possible
approaches to Howe’s work and conclude that neither formalism nor
feminism nor historicism fully accounts for the ambiguous character and
unfinished plot. Howe’s hermaphrodite is a postcontemporary work. This
conclusion implies a position within the relatively new field of
posthumanist studies. I consider posthumanism a reading practice rather
than a point in time or a contemporary experience.

Posthumanism and Postgender

Posthumanism has been defined in multiple ways: as the theory and the
experience that succeeds postmodernism; as a term that encompasses
animal studies; as a critique of humanism; and as a way of reading.
Sidonie Smith outlines these various strands of posthumanist thought as
she sets up her argument for “Reading the Posthuman Backward: Mary
Rowlandson’s Double Witnessing.”4 When Smith applies posthumanism
to a colonial captivity narrative, she finds “disharmony” in the Puritan
covenant. As Smith explains, Rowlandson turns to the Bible to restore her
connection to God. Reaching beyond the human to the divine might be
considered a kind of posthumanism, an effort to exceed the physical
limitations of the human body, inherent to Puritan spirituality. But
Rowlandson’s account also depends on a more humanist or proto-

3
Howe, Hermaphrodite, 195.
4
Sidonie Smith, “Reading the Posthuman Backward: Mary Rowlandson’s Double
Witnessing,” Biography 35 (2012): 138.
 Kimberly Engber 35

anthropological eye witnessing that leads her to greater understanding of

indigenous culture. Certainly a postmodernist can account for these
multiple, unresolved points of view. What then can posthumanism add?
Posthumanist thinkers question the categories we use to understand
humanity. They question the inevitability of a human future and the
centrality of human reproduction.5 Carey Wolfe considers posthumanism
“an intellectual genealogy in no way limited to the last 20 years or even,
for that matter, to the twenty-first (or twentieth) century.”6 Prominent
among earlier articulations of posthumanism, Donna Haraway’s
“Manifesto for Cyborgs” is for Wolfe “perhaps the central theoretical
statement of posthumanism.”7 Haraway tries to exceed social theories that
propose returning to an original unity. She refers to Freudian, Marxist, and
Feminist schools of thought, all of which influence her thinking but
ultimately limit its scope. Whether emphasizing psychological, social or
sexual origin, each of these philosophies asks adherents to believe that
they were somehow pure before society got in the way. Instead, Haraway
begins with the cyborg: "a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck
with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other
seductions to organic wholeness." Thinking through the cyborg allows us
to dispense with any anxiety about society getting in the way of our
unadulterated nature because "the cyborg has no origin story in the
Western sense."8 The cyborg has no future story either and is unburdened
by the drive to reproduce.
To say that we are cyborgs also suggests that there is not a clear
separation between one human and another or between humans and the
things around us. This has implications for the way we think about nature
as well as culture. The cyborg questions binary divisions, a by now
familiar move in postmodern theory, but it does not stop there. It also
separates sex and reproduction and other seemingly natural and necessary
pairings such as desire and difference. Haraway’s cyborg is echoed in
Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern. Latour argues that we
moderns mistakenly believe that laboratory sciences isolate "things

5
Maria Temmes, “Reproducing Dichotomies: Queer Posthumanism and
Reproduction in Biopolitical State,” (MA Thesis, Central European University,
2011), 3.
6
Carey Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species and
Posthumanist Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 2.
7
Ibid.
8
Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 150-151.
36 We Have Never Been Gendered

themselves" from social forms like economy or language.9 To be modern

is to purify the world of monsters and, paradoxically, to proliferate them. I
invoke Latour to suggest something similar about the work of gender.
Haraway’s postgenderism may sound impossible or at the very least
undesirable. Posthumanism sounds even more dangerous, particularly for
literary studies or any pursuit focused in some way on human feeling,
experience, and/or expression. However, posthumanism does not so much
discard Humanism or the broadmindedness commonly associated with it
as try to do it one better. Posthumanist scholars point out the danger in
making distinctions between human and animal, human and nonhuman.
These distinctions justify racial and sexual hierarchies, slavery and
environmental destruction because whatever is less than human should be
subject to human control. Talking instead about the cyborg and hybridity,
posthumanists suggest that contradictory impulses coexist in any one
body, whether human, animal, machine, or social. Abandoning the dream
of a return to unity will liberate each of us to recognize difference as
something both internal and external. Over a century before Haraway’s
theoretical intervention, Julia Ward Howe explored similar ideas in fiction.
Like Haraway's cyborg, Howe's Hermaphrodite undermines "certainty
about what counts as nature,” and embraces “monstrous and illegitimate"
affinities.10

The Hermaphrodite and Form

Before its first publication by the University of Nebraska Press in
2004, The Hermaphrodite had no known or clear form, no beginning, no
end, no title or cover. The manuscript was "a jumble of pages—the closest
to a possible first page begins midsentence, on a page that is carefully
numbered with a ʊ2," as Gary Williams explains in his editorial preface.
Williams speculates about what he considers a curious method of
preservation, pointing out that "it is possible that Howe removed the first
page in order to hide the manuscript in plain sight. If her first page was
embellished with a provocative title or subtitle, removing it might have
been a conscious, cautious strategy for rendering the manuscript
invisible."11 In other words, this manuscript existed in the condition of its

9
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 35.
10
Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto, 155.
11
Gary Williams, “Speaking with the Voices of Others: Julia Ward Howe’s
Laurence,” introduction to The Hermaphrodite, by Julia Ward Howe (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 3.
 Kimberly Engber 37

protagonist. It existed as a form somewhere between knowable forms,

unread. Its unread condition may have been accidental, or as Williams
admits, "Of course it is also possible that page one was lost by accident
and that Howe or her loving literary-executor daughters preserved the
fragments carefully and felt frustration and annoyance over the missing
first page."12 It is also possible that the executors of Howe’s literary estate,
Howe’s daughters overlooked the manuscript. Williams speculates that
“the daughters (like contemporary scholars) were overwhelmed by the
sheer amount of their mother‘s manuscript materials and simply bundled
this folder with the rest, unaware of its peculiar nature."13 Williams
suggests that drafts of the manuscript have had a private audience. Close
friends may have been asked to comment on portions of it at the time of its
composition. Twentieth-century scholars read some pieces and quoted
from them in biographical and literary critical accounts of Howe, but they
did not try to reconstruct and publish them.
No scholar has established Howe’s reason for writing this strange story
or for abandoning it. She reflects some of the currents of thought that
surrounded her in New England, but she does not fit neatly into any
literary or intellectual circle. In her journal, Howe refers to her protagonist
as an "unsexed soul," echoing the language used by her mentor Margaret
Fuller in “The Great Lawsuit,” a widely-read essay in which Fuller objects
to the condition of women in the nineteenth century. Whereas Fuller and
other American Transcendentalists most often shaped their thought
experiments into essays, Howe uses fictional narrative, following the
darker Romantics, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Harriet
Prescott Spofford. Howe leads her monstrous protagonist into a dark
wilderness and leaves him stranded in a crumbling stone chapel then
abandons these gothic conventions and returns Laurence to society. The
Hermaphrodite is a Bildungsroman wrapped in a domestic fiction
punctuated by gothic elements and culminating in an argument that
counters the medical case study. Gary Williams believes that Howe’s story
has what he calls "aesthetic progenitors" in texts she was known to have
read, such as Ovid's Metamorphosis. But this is speculative. For actual
evidence of Howe’s intent, Williams turns to letters and journals. Howe
attempted to write what she called a "little romance" in a letter to her sister
Louisa.14 In a diary begun around 1843, Howe provides another clue. She

12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Gary Williams and Renee Bergland, eds., The Philosophies of Sex: Critical
Essays on The Hermaphrodite, (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press,
2010), 80.
38 We Have Never Been Gendered

copies an excerpt from a letter she had written, although she fails to
include the name of the correspondent. She focuses mainly on work,
writing: "My pen has been remarkably busy during the last year. It has
brought me some happy inspiration, and though the golden tide is now at
its ebb, I live in the hope that it may rise again in time to float off the
stranded wreck of a novel, or rather story, in which I have been deeply
engaged for three months past." After emphasizing her productivity, Howe
articulates her aspiration and frustration. Her deep engagement with a new
project has not yet crystallized into a product. Howe struggles with the
form. And, as her next sentence reveals, she struggles against the
expectations of contemporary readers: "It is not, understand me, a moral
and fashionable work destined to be published in three volumes," she
insists. Instead, it is "the history of a strange being, written as truly as I
know how to write it. Whether it will ever be published, I cannot tell, but I
should like to have you read it, and to talk with you about it."15 Howe
modestly offers this history to a friend, as a conversation prompt, perhaps
nothing more.
Howe’s work defies formal definition. A brief summary will make this
point clear. Howe begins with a plot of self-development made popular in
the nineteenth century by the translation and wide circulation of German
Romantic writer Goethe’s novels. Like Goethe’s young Werther, Howe’s
protagonist, Laurence, grows from apprenticeship to mastery and
recognition of his social responsibility. Yet Laurence also experiences
struggles more often associated with plots centered on female characters,
particularly the struggle to achieve a sense of self or full self-development
in a patriarchal society. From the beginning of The Hermaphrodite, a first-
person narrator creates a sense of intimacy with the reader, revealing the
secret that even his friends do not know: he must “learn to seem that which
[he] could never be”—a man.16 The oldest child of a land-owning family,
Laurence enjoys the privilege of an all-male boarding school where he
excels as a scholar; he has friends although he is “distinguishable from
them chiefly by a stronger impulse of physical modesty, a greater
sensitiveness to kindness, or its reverse, more quickness and less
endurance, a more vivid imagination, and a feebler power of reasoning.”17
As a child, he does not recognize these qualities as womanly, but as he
grows into adolescence, his delicacy and beauty draw the attention of both
women and men, as he explains. Laurent mimics his friends’ devotion to
the young girls around him but remains free from passionate feelings for

15
Ibid., 81.
16
Howe, Hermaphrodite, 3.
17
Ibid.
 Kimberly Engber 39

women or men. This apparent indifference attracts the much sought after
young widow, Emma von P., and this time, Laurence’s play acting leads to
tragedy. Disinherited after the birth of a younger brother, Laurence
struggles to find his place in the world. He returns to school, this time as
the older companion of a young man who rescued him from near death.
This story also turns into a love plot. It culminates in a confrontation when
the young man insists that Laurence is not a man. How else can the youth
explain his passionate love for his friend? At this point, just as Laurence
casts out alone again, in despair, the story breaks off. A second story
begins with the description of the character, now named Laurent, strolling
through an Italian carnival with his friend Berto. In the midst of a
philosophical conversation, Berto hatches a plan to dress Laurent as a
woman so that Laurent can learn the mysteries of women’s ways. Berto
sends his friend to live among his three very different and very
accomplished sisters. Late in this second section, reference to a father and
brother make it clear that Howe is working with the same character
although some of the details have changed. The story ends with Laurent
suffering from an unspecified illness that renders him mute and
unresponsive, subject to the scrutiny of doctors and friends who struggle to
come to terms with Laurent’s indeterminate sex.

A Personal Account
Howe’s characters reflect the cultural importance of physical
anomalies and their representation or display in the nineteenth century.
"Especially in Victorian America," Rosemarie Garland Thompson
maintains, "the exhibition of freaks exploded into a public ritual that
bonded a sundering polity together in the collective act of looking,"18 The
collective looking that Thompson cites as critical for a fragile nation is
disrupted in Howe’s fiction. Howe refuses the role of showman embraced
by many of her contemporaries, the most famous of them the great
showman P.T. Barnum who established his American Museum in 1841,
installing a freak show in the center of New York City. Barnum often
framed his human exhibits with props that highlighted their exoticism. He
photographed people against a jungle backdrop, for example, and
circulated these images as small inexpensive cards. Because of the
relatively new technologies to create inexpensive reproductions, anyone
could hold a freak in his or her hands and feel normal in comparison. The

18
Rosemarie Garland Thompson, Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the
Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 4.
40 We Have Never Been Gendered

difference from a freak defined the self. The freak show remained popular
through a long period of modernization and increasing mechanization in
America, from about 1840 to about 1940. The prevalence of these freakish
images may help explain Howe’s ability to imagine sexual anomaly. It
does not explain her impulse to speak in the voice of the freak.
Some critics have turned to biography to account for Howe’s unusual
narrative point of view. They suggest that Howe’s fiction retells the story
of her marriage to Samuel Howe and thus serves a more therapeutic than
aesthetic or philosophical purpose. The story covers Howe’s “psychological
terrain,” in the words of Gary Williams.19 The main character “functions
as a site for Julia Howe’s contemplation of her own psychological
androgyny.”20 Williams and others read The Hermaphrodite as Howe's
attempt to come to terms with Sam Howe's strong emotional attachment to
his long-time friend Charles Sumner. They contend that Howe’s depiction
of Laurence gazing at passionate women through dispassionate eyes
reveals the way Howe's husband may have been looking at her. Trying to
identify with a main character who is more than one sex in one body, yet
who is raised as a boy so that he can enjoy the advantages of this sex is
much more frustrating than these biographical readings suggest. Williams’
“psychological androgyny” gets closer to the reading experience, but
Williams sounds squeamish. Why only psychological? While a psychological
reading is in many ways persuasive, it limits our understanding of the
hermaphrodite to what was thwarted within the social world of nineteenth-
century America. Literary study has the great advantage of examining
what it was possible to imagine.
Other critics leave aside the biographical yet still consider Howe's
manuscript as a historical document useful for reconstructing nineteenth-
century gender relations. They focus on one of the central female
characters, the widow Emma, to argue that Howe represents a deliberate
violation of the code of purity and passivity associated with Victorian
American womanhood. Howe's story to some extent explores "what it
means to be a woman," as Emma phrases it.21 Emma appears early in the
course of events as a "strange interruption" in Laurence's last year of
college study.22 She comes into the all-male boarding school world and
quickly gains the attention and affection of many of its members. Laurence
describes her as a "handsome and sprightly widow" who makes
“maidenhood”—or the young girls who previously claimed the affection

19
Williams, introduction, xi.
20
Ibid., xxvii.
21
Howe, Hermaphrodite, 15.
22
Ibid., 6.
 Kimberly Engber 41

of the other young men—seem "quite tame and crude in comparison with
the ever varying power and beauties of the all-accomplished, fully
developed woman.”23 At this point, the narrator and narrative are
appreciative of Emma's self-possession. The story seems to be developing
a strong female character with whom readers may be encouraged to
identify. It quickly becomes a story of unrequited affection and thwarted
female passion, however. Laurence courts Emma but remains courtly. He
wants to talk to Emma "of the relations of pure spirit" rather than feeling
and physical desire.24 Since the story is told from Laurence's first-person
perspective, it ultimately reveals more about this protagonist's inability to
understand and subsequent refusal to see women than it does about
Emma’s experience.
That Emma's immodesty fails to shock Laurence or, perhaps by
extension, the reader seems revolutionary. But Emma's liberation is not as
central to the plot as Laurence’s. After months of courtship, Emma bursts
into Laurence's room to offer herself to him, and he looks at her with what
he describes as "horror."25 Misunderstanding the expression as shock at
her unwomanly action, Emma persists, pleading for a moment of bodily
pleasure if love between them is not possible. The scene of seduction
proceeds as Emma comes slowly up to Laurence, gradually "uncovering"
the hermaphrodite's body. In the narrator's words, but through Emma's
eyes, we see for the first time "every outline of the equivocal form[...]the
bearded lip and earnest brow[...]the falling shoulders, slender neck, and
rounded bosom."26 Laurence still narrates the scene even as he becomes
the object of scrutiny within it. He assumes a seemingly impossible point
of view, a position outside of his own body. This despatialized narrative
position reflects Laurence’s split consciousness as well as the inability of
the single narrator to contain the hermaphrodite. The narrative must be
dispersed yet the reader’s desire must be preserved. Howe heightens the
eroticism in this scene by keeping the hermaphrodite covered, suggesting
more than showing. The bedclothes have been disturbed so that the body is
outlined underneath them, and Emma traces a physical form that combines
the familiar and the strange, female and male. She cries out at the
emergence of what she calls "a monster” and collapses to the floor.
Writhing at Laurence’s feet, Emma becomes snake-like, monstrous and
mad, allowing the reader’s affinity to return to the protagonist who calmly
points out that he is God’s creation, a natural form and therefore a spiritual

23
Ibid., 7.
24
Ibid., 15.
25
Ibid., 17.
26
Ibid., 19.
42 We Have Never Been Gendered

one. The problem is not entirely Laurence’s body or Emma's passion; it is

at least in part the mistaken assumption that desire depends on difference.
Emma's misrecognition of Laurence as a man is the first mistake. The
greater mistake is her inability to acknowledge her desire for a body with
whom she might also identify. Eve Sedgwick explains that "individual
identity, including sexual identity, is social and relational rather than
original or private; it is established only ex post facto, by recognition.”27 In
Sedgwick's sense, Emma has fallen in love with Laurence’s gender
performance. Sedgwick is interested in the signifying practices that gothic
conventions in particular exploit. “Like virginity, the veil that symbolizes
virginity in a girl or a nun has a strong erotic savor of its own, and
characters in Gothic novels fall in love as much with women's veils as
with women."28 The culminating encounter between Laurence and Emma
is only the first in a series of failed recognitions that test these erotic
symbols. Like Emma, characters in gothic fictions often struggle to
contain their desire for another character and their failure to exercise self-
control leads to death. Marianne Noble reminds us that "the gothic arose at
a moment when Enlightenment thinkers were idealizing the human being
as a coherent, rational self. The gothic represents the underside of this
ideal, exposing both the illicit desires and the tactics of terror used to
repress them during the construction of hegemonic subjectivities."29 The
gothic challenges the idea that we are human because we can reason.
While some literary scholars distinguish gothic fiction from more
conventional domestic fictions, Noble links them, citing “the core of
horror in nineteenth-century sentimentality.”30 Fundamental to both
fictional forms is the visibility of the female body. In nineteenth century
America, a woman disappeared into marriage; she changed her name and
gave up her property. But sympathizing with another’s suffering—the
demand placed upon female characters in sentimental fictions and female
readers of them—disrupts what Noble calls this “culturally imposed
gender identification.”31 Sentimentality encourages women to transgress
their bodily boundaries, to identify briefly and deeply with someone not

27
Eve Sedgwick, "The Character in the Veil: Imagery of Surface in the Gothic
Novel" PMLA 96 (1981): 256.
28
Ibid.
29
Marianne Noble, “An Ecstasy of Apprehension: The Gothic Pleasures of
Sentimental Fiction,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National
Narrative, edited by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 1998), 165.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid., 166.
 Kimberly Engber 43

like them. Emma fails this test when she refuses to allow her desire to mix
with sympathetic identification. The reader may learn from her failure.
To further explore Laurence’s struggle against social expectations,
Howe turns more fully to the possibilities offered by gothic conventions.
She leads Laurence into an unspecified remote location in a chapter titled
"A Lodge in the Wilderness." Laurence wanders into this wilderness after
suffering through what he calls the "first and last kiss that woman and
woman's love ever wrung from him."32 Laurence "imprisoned" a kiss upon
the dead Emma's lips then set out to win fame and fortune, in part to forget
Emma and in part to revenge himself upon his father who had renounced
him and made his younger brother heir to the estate. Craving physical rest
and mental labor, Laurence comes upon "a low and ancient structure of
unknown stone, overgrown with mosses and ivy."33 To Laurence's eyes, it
is the ideal "hermitage." He longs to take possession of it. The place
instead takes possession of him, turning him gradually into a hermit like
the inhabitants before him and almost destroying him in the process.
Spiritual contemplation leads Laurence to physical depravation; his
extreme self-denial takes him to the brink of death, but he wakes up from a
faint cradled in the arms of a boy. He feels his head "supported by one
who had raised it from the marble floor" and at the same time, "a sudden
thrill of terror" makes him aware "of the presence of a pair of strange
eyes."34 The sudden thrill that Laurence experiences in Ronald’s arms
contrasts with the cold horror that Emma had exacted from him earlier.
This time the contemplation is mutual. Laurence recalls that he looked into
Ronald’s eyes, "silently returned their gaze" and let "their beauty" sink
into his soul. Howe seems to have gotten to the love story at last, but the
focus veers away from this tender embrace to isolation yet again.
Howe creates yet another case study of misrecognition and self-
loathing. After the young Ronald mistakenly addresses Laurence as
"Madame," he hands Laurence a mirror. Seeing a gaunt long-haired figure
in the reflection, Laurence is "terrified" and insists "I am no woman!"35
But what is so terrifying about this reflection? After all, we know that
Laurence is not a man either, although his performance of masculinity was
convincing enough to Emma. And this emphatic denial of femininity does
not prevent young Ronald from declaring Laurence a liar many months
later, when their acquaintance has deepened into affection and, in Ronald’s
case, passion:

32
Howe, Hermaphrodite, 34.
33
Ibid., 36.
34
Ibid., 49.
35
Ibid., 51.
44 We Have Never Been Gendered

Yes you are that lie, and I am your victim, but you can cancel the wrong,
oh angel-fiend. You can change my torment to the raptures of heaven. You
shall be a man to all the world, if you will, but a woman, a sweet, warm,
living woman to me—you must love me, Laurence.”36

Must is a strong word; it emphasizes Ronald’s idea of love as a

liberating force that will free Laurence from being “thus encased, thus
imprisoned” in clothes that mask his beauty. Although the paradox of
ordering someone to liberate himself does not occur to Ronald, it may be
apparent to the reader who sees the scene from Laurence’s point of view.
When confronted by Emma, Laurence left his body, seeing and describing
himself from the passionate woman’s perspective. Ronald’s confrontation
leaves Laurence speechless. Like Emma, Ronald slips from thwarted
desire to madness, but rather than falling at Laurence’s feet, Ronald insists
upon his right to possession. He has locked the door to the rooms they
share. He has unloaded Laurence’s guns, a calculated emasculation. He
claims Laurence:

“You are mine by fate, mine by the power of my will, and my first crime is
also yours, for it is born of the union of your soul and mine.”37

Readers are trapped with the hermaphrodite in yet another policed space,
and we long to escape, not so much to escape the body but to escape the
constraints others put on it and the demands others make of it.

Conclusion
I have come to several conclusions in the course of writing this essay:
1. an unpublished manuscript is both a historical and a contemporary
work; 2. a postcontemporary theory should give us a way to read historical
as well as contemporary work; 3. we have not finished the work of
historicizing gender; and 4. literary scholarship can help to define “the
horizons of possibility” for our thinking about sex and gender. Donna
Haraway complains in a 2006 interview about “the way people go for a
utopian post-gender world.” When people hear the term postgender, they
tend to think, “Ah, that means it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a
woman any more,” but “that’s not true,” according to Haraway.38 So then
what does it mean to go beyond gender? A posthuman reading of Howe

36
Ibid., 86.
37
Ibid., 87.
38
Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto, 137.
 Kimberly Engber 45

recuperates her hermaphrodite as an alternative plot. Howe’s hermaphrodite

has no future to inherit, no desire to reproduce, no beginning and no end,
nothing but a present story. The Hermaphrodite is a queer work recovered
by contemporary scholars. It refuses the separation between nature
(imagined as fixed) and society (imagined as mutable). Howe’s work
reminds us that we have not progressed into an age of sexual hybridity.
Rather, we are always in danger of forgetting what it was possible to
imagine in the past. The tragedy of Howe’s hermaphrodite suggests that
difference is as internal as external and that separating identification and
desire creates monsters.
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
IN TRANSHUMANISM

JANA VIZMULLER-ZOCCO

It is likely that musing about the post-humanist, postmodern,

contemporary world leads into a dead end. It is much more urgent, albeit
disturbing, for those who live and breathe verbal language together with
one of its most significant products, literature, to cast their sights toward
the future. It is necessarily an urgent voyage because language and
literature, if they are indeed what is most human about humanity, can no
longer claim their pre-eminence. Multimodal, multi-sensorial
understanding of the world (including new senses–see below) is taking
over whatever bases there were on which to build knowledge, hone
memories, engage in fantasizing, construct real and fictional worlds
through verbal language. This devaluation of language and its uses, among
other cultural upheavals (absence of hope, dearth of ideals, overabundance
of distractions, disruptive technologies, rampant consumerism, demise of
the left, to mention just a few) is what makes looking forward into the
future also disturbing.
Imagining the future from the perspective of language and literature
means taking on, above all, ideas borne out of technological innovations
both as they are happening and as they are being foretold. One of the most
interesting and thought-provoking outlooks is offered by transhumanism.
Transhumanism is an international “intellectual and cultural movement
that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the
human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and
making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly
enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.”1 The

1
Humanity+, “Transhumanist FAQ,”
http://humanityplus.org/philosophy/transhumanist-faq/#answer_19, see also Fritz
Allhof et al., “Ethics of Human Enhancement: 25 Questions and Answers,” paper
prepared for US National Science Foundation (2009), and Roland Benedikter,
James Giordano, and Kevin Fitzgerald, “The Future of the Self-image of the
 Jana Vizmuller-Zocco 47

guiding idea promotes enhancement of all human cognitive, physical and

psychological capacities (senses, skills, organs) using reason and science.
Transhumanism looks forward to conscious self-evolution as illustrated
through the need to fight against human biological limits (especially old
age). It also claims that there are no ethical or moral reasons not to
interfere with nature in order to ameliorate the human condition. Although
the movement seems to share similarities with religion (specifically, both
expressing the desire to transcend animal limitations),2 its proponents do
not accept this theistic view, as they claim to be relying on reason to solve
problems which are due to human biological and cognitive limitations.
Transhumanism has ideological connections to Vernon Vinge’s and Ray
Kurzweil’s “singularity” which predicts an exponential growth and
acceleration of technological innovation. According to Kurzweil, “the
intelligence that will emerge will continue to represent the human
civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization. This will be
the next step in evolution, the next high level paradigm shift.”3
Some enhancement methods include conventional means (education,
enriched environment, mental engagement, memory techniques, drugs),
others take advantage of new technologies, such as transcranial magnetic
stimulation, genetic modification, prenatal enhancement, brain-computer
interfaces, external hardware and software, neural implants, etc.4 The aim
is to escape from human biological limitations.
Generally speaking, enhancement seems to be going in three
directions: 1. In one case, human being acquires animal senses, skills,
organs, for example, night vision, bat vision, gills (in order to breathe in
water); 2. In the second case, human melds with technology, acquiring
non-biological, technological prostheses at will, and 3. Cyborg beings who
augment their abilities, skills, organs by benefitting from a combination of

Human Being in the Age of Transhumanism, Neurotechnology and Global

Transition,” Futures 42 (2010): 1102-1109.
2
See Patrick D. Hopkins, “Transcending the Animal: How Transhumanism and
Religion Are and Are Not Alike,” Journal of Evolution & Technology 14, 2
(2005): 13-28, and Maxwell J. Mehlman, “How close are we to being able to
achieve the transhumanist vision?,” in The Posthuman Condition: Ethics,
Aesthetics & Politics of Biotechnological Challenges, edited by Kasper Lippert-
Rasmussen, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (Copenhagen: Aarhus
University Press, 2012), 46.
3
Ray Kurzweil, “The law of accelerating returns,” http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-
law-of-accelerating-returns.
4
Anders Sandberg, “Cognition Enhancement: Upgrading the Brain,” in Enhancing
Human Capacities, ed. Julian Savulescu, et al. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011),
71-91.
48 Language and Literature in Transhumanism

the three: animal-human-robot. Of course, the combinatorial possibilities

are endless and the outcome feared most by many observers leads to a
complete obliteration of the biological human. In that case, questions of
verbal language and literature are truly otiose.
It has also been suggested that there are

“two ways in which we might imagine applying enhancement technologies

to create posthumans: to ourselves, beings currently in existence, or to new
beings yet to be created”5

The following discussion relates to both.

Clearly, radical enhancement does not point simply to a distinct
improvement in function (such as treatment of a disease in order to heal
it), but a significant overcoming of biological limitations, i.e. going
beyond what is considered normal human capacity or skill. In this view,
correcting stuttering would not count as enhancement of language and
making it cognitively possible to tell more interesting stories would not
count as enhancement of narrative/literary skills. The advocates of radical
enhancement assert that they want to “turn rational, moralizing, tool-using
humans into creatures who are more rational, more moral, and better at
making and using tools.”6 Given these premises, clearly, a discussion
about transhumanism would require an analysis that is greatly beyond the
scope proposed here; specifically, given the fact that sheer complexity of
ethical questions raised by transhumanism is overwhelming.7 Although
ethical issues do not form a part of what follows, they bring to bear crucial
ideas to the status of language and literature in a technological,
transhuman, efficiency-obsessed world.
It is troublesome that not one humanities or social sciences
representative has as of now joined the transhumanist discussion in
earnest, beyond some philosophers and ethics researchers. Neither are

5
Sarah Chan and John Harris, "Post-What? (And Why Does It Matter?)," in The
Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological
Challenges, edited by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and
Jacob Wamberg (Copenhagen: Aarhus University Press, 2012), 80.
6
Nicholas Agar, Humanity's End: Why We Should Reject Radical Enhancement, in
Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology, ed. Kim Sterelny
and Robert A. Wilson (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2010), 20.
7
Bostrom, Nick. “Human Genetic Enhancements: A Transhumanist Perspective.”
The Journal of Value Inquiry 37 (2004): 493-506, and Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen,
et al., eds., “Posthuman Horizons and Realities: Introduction,” in The Posthuman
Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges
(Copenhagen: Aarhus University Press, 2012), 7-9.
 Jana Vizmuller-Zocco 49

there transhumanist-based publications and research whose focus is

language enhancement or literature. Several transhumanist theorists
remark, however briefly, on language-related matters. Campa mentions
that fiction (novels) can be used as an aid in comprehending societal
transformation: in that case, fiction is functional to transhumanist aims, a
function as “provider of institutional services is, after all, common.”8
Agar, discussing the superior intellect, indicates its capacity to understand
humor, narration, and the ability to read a book in seconds.9 Sandberg and
Savulescu write that

“While at present [cognitive] enhancements are modest in effect,

understanding of brain plasticity and development is likely to yield
enhancements that if given early in life, could have profound changes in
learning, for example, in knowledge or language acquisition,” 10

however, they do not elaborate on the last point. Clearly, these ideas are
peripheral and do not tackle the language and literature issues head-on. It
must be underlined that science-fiction works in the form of novels (or
films) present utopian or dystopian worlds pretty much using the existing
language (of course, with additional special vocabulary items to account
for novel experiences, materials, etc.). Literature and myth, for their part,
have been inquiring into the relationship between human and
‘technological’ non-human for millennia (from golem to Prometheus to
Frankenstein and beyond). But the point here is not analyze which science
fiction short story or novel or poetry includes technologically-based
characters and what they tells us about human past, present and future:
after all, literary criticism has achieved great strides in doing just this.11
Rather, what is at stake is the narrative/fictional/literary post-human-ness
which the transhumanist vision seems to be dismissing and therefore needs
to be brought to the surface.
The main aim of this paper is to bring language and literature into the
debate on human augmentation and attempt to trace some broad outlines

8
Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature, (New Haven and London: Yale
University, 1990), 65.
9
Ibid., 31.
10
Julian Savulescu, et al., eds., Enhancing Human Capacities (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2011), 95.
11
See, e.g., Carl Friedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction, (Hanover, NH:
Wesleyan UP of New England, 2000), Brian Attebery and Veronica Hollinger,
eds., Parabolas of Science Fiction, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
2013), and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008).
50 Language and Literature in Transhumanism

for future conjectures. The case must be made for linguists, literary critics,
and other humanists to join in the excruciatingly speedy technological
change that underpins transhumanist possibilities. Before tackling these
issues, however, it is instructive to concisely analyze the language of
transhumanists, in other words, the semantic underpinnings of this
movement, frequently used key words or phrases and their meanings, and
the effects these linguistic processes have on the increasing popularity of
transhumanism. There are two general directions of most written and
visual representations of transhumanist thought. They rely, on the one
hand, on unbounded optimism and belief in reason and technology which
both have the power not only to improve but also surpass the biological
limitations of humans. In this way, all the positive connotations of
Humanism and Enlightenment survive: respect for others, reason as the
cure for all, desire for knowledge, etc. (But transhumanists problematize
modernity: see the discussion below). On the other hand, there is also the
awareness that technological innovations will bring about the moment at
which machines become more intelligent than humans and therefore cause
a possible demise of Homo sapiens. A thorough dissection of both of these
semantic tendencies by linguists and literary critics may illuminate the
movement’s weaknesses and strengths. Key phrases with positive
connotations, such as utopia, demise of illnesses, end of senescence,
acquisition of new senses propel the movement in a fantastical future.
However, ambiguous (i.e. positive and negative) meanings of expressions
such as sentient/intelligent robots, genetic modification, near immortality,
singularity underline that for the first time in human history, the “human
race would be at the mercy of machines.”12 Clearly, Giambattista Vico’s
dictum “verum factum est” (i.e., “we can only know what we made”)
would sound like an ominous prophecy and at once lose all its meaning.
What is more significant, though, is the fact that there is a singular lack
of neologisms in transhumanist writings: after all, transhumanism looks
forward to as yet unimagined future, and it is therefore crucial to make it if
not come alive, at least comprehensible, using specific newly-coined
words and phrases, akin to science-fiction writing which attempts to
describe imaginary worlds, things, actions, characters. Csisery-Ronay
coins this new use of words and phrases in science fiction works “fictive

12
Bill Joy, “Why the future doesn’t need us: Our most powerful 21st-century
technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to
make humans an endangered species,” Wired, 8.04 (April 2000),
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html, 2.
 Jana Vizmuller-Zocco 51

neology”13 and describes a number of mechanisms by which authors

achieve a balance between estrangement and incomprehensibility. This
absence of newly-invented words is at the heart of transhumanists’ strange
stance that claims their utter inability to imagine what lies ahead for the
enhanced beings (see also below).
Transhumanist projects can be grouped into 4 main topics, each of
which has implications for language and literature: 1. Radical life
extension, 2. Cryonics, 3. Mind uploading, and 4. Radical enhancement.
Over all, the movement aims at self-directed evolution, a drastic departure
from Darwinian evolutionary processes.

1. Radical life extension

In a normal course of human life-span, neither the ability to use and
comprehend language nor enjoyment of literature suffer great debilitating
problems. Of course, memory affects both; vision impairment reduces the
use of written sources; auditory impairment makes speech understanding
difficult. Both of these impairments are being studied and remedies so far
make it possible for the continuing regular workings of these two senses.
So were we to continue living as biological beings (having speech, vision
and hearing) for, let’s say, 1000 years, no great disruptions of linguistic
abilities or of fruition of literature would ensue. In this case, consequences
for language and literature under radical life extension would not be
overwhelming.

2. Cryonics
Cryonics involves the preservation of a body in a freezing medium (the
technology now calls for ice-free vitrification, where no structural damage
occurs),14 sustaining it in the hope that it may be revived later and
therefore that it may be healed or kept alive for much longer. Although
this preservation may last for centuries, none of the writings dealing with
it analyze the implications for language and literature: there seems to be no
concern about the fact that languages change and cultural stories change.
The rate, direction, depth, effects of linguistic and cultural change are not
predictable, even though the rate of change in the past has been given
some possible quantification by glottochronologists, but their concern is
with the past. Verbal change is concomitant with cultural, social, political,
economic, psychological change: what will happen to those who will

13
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 13 et passim.
14
See Alcor Life Extension Foundation, “What is Cryonics?,”
http://www.alcor.org/AboutCryonics/.
52 Language and Literature in Transhumanism

awaken 500 years hence and will not be able to verbally communicate
their desire to be healed? Do they leave the decipherment of their main
purpose to the future cultural milieu without knowing what it will be like?
Do they rely on possibly hostile cyborgs’ interpretation of their wishes?
Will their cryo-preserved bodies be used as organ farms by the future
beings? A smattering of notions offered by historical linguistics would
possibly make cryonics enthusiasts delve a bit deeper into the
repercussions of this process. The linguistic implications of language
change go hand-in-hand with the development and transformation of
narrative literature. Although numerous science fiction works describe and
use this aspect of the fictional future, none of the material dealing with
cryogenics is concerned with fictional narration. Therefore, consequences
for language and literature within cryogenics depend very much on the
cultural milieu of the future society into which the preserved individual
would be awakened. Therefore, all contingencies must be foreseen for the
successful cryogenics process to take effect.

3. Mind uploading
Whether labelling it mind uploading or substrate independent minds,

“The point is the liberation of the mind from any particular substrate. Once
one’s mind is liberated from a particular substrate, then, at that point, one
can choose what kind of embodiment one wants. Some will want human
bodies, some monkeys, some cute fluffy bunnies, some flying space robots,
some virtual-world avatars — and some will want things we cannot now
imagine…. Each chosen embodiment will influence the nature of the mind
instantiated in it, often quite dramatically, and that will be part of the
wonder!”15

None of the embodiment forms mentioned in the quote above is endowed

with all of the necessary organs for speech: lungs, vocal folds, mouth
cavity, tongue, teeth, soft palate, nasal cavity, etc. Does that mean that
mind uploading will do away with organ-based embodied communication?
Or does that mean that no one thinking about mind uploading is aware that
taking verbal language into account is still important, especially at this
preliminary stage?

15
Ben Goerzel, “Goertzel Contra Dvorsky on Mind Uploading,” H+ Magazine
(April 21, 2013), http://hplusmagazine.com/2013/04/21/goertzel-contra-dvorsky-
on-mind-uploading/.
 Jana Vizmuller-Zocco 53

Interestingly enough, and supporting the argument presented here for

the urgent involvement of linguistics and literary critics in many
transhumanist plans, The Carboncopies project calls for advancements in

“Nanotechnology, biotechnology, brain imaging, neuroscience, artificial

intelligence, computational hardware and architectures, cognitive
psychology and philosophy.”16

Linguistics is not one of the required fields, nor is any other humanities
other than philosophy. It is ironic that all the scientific musings about the
future happen using verbal language, but none of these musings gives any
importance of this mode of communication for the future beings.

4. Radical enhancement
Enhancement (augmentation, amelioration) in a radical sense brings
about total transformations to the biological human. Additional senses,
organs, skills which augment the existing senses, organs, skills, will
produce a totally different being whose self-directed evolution may result
in unexpected behaviour, functions, etc. The question therefore can be
raised, whether also language can be enhanced. Some examples of recent
attempts at language enhancement include memory experiments with
drugs, e.g., by Breitenstein et al.17 and Knecht et al.18 Nevertheless, both
these publications report on the results of studies which used D-
Amphetamine and levodopa to boost novel invented-word learning; in
other words, they do not reflect real world language use.
This paper is not concerned with enhancement of communication in
general. Nevertheless, some relevant ideas about this topic are sketched in
Table 1 below.
Clearly, it would be advantageous for humans to be endowed with the
communication systems of animals such as dolphins or chimpanzees or
bees, if only to understand the world through their experience, as well as
to communicate with them. For example, it will be possible to finally
answer the question “What is it like to be a bat?” Furthermore, it would
also bring a more speedy solution to certain problems of technical nature if
we had a direct access to computer languages and vice-versa. Further still,

16
Carboncopies Project, http://www.carboncopies.org/.
17
Caterina Breitenstein, et al., “D-Amphetamine boosts language learning
independent of its cardiovascular and motor arousing effects,”
Neuropsychopharmacology 29 (2004): 1704-1714.
18
Stefan Knecht, et al., “Levodopa: Faster and better word learning in normal
humans,” Annals of Neurology 56, 1 (July 2004): 20-26.
54 Language and Literature in Transhumanism

what kind of narrative fictional texts would be possible to create using

these additional communicative enhancements? But these and other
aspects of enhancing communication are not a part of this paper.

Communication type Communication Implications for

enhancement verbal language
human-animal (flora Human endowed with Need to increase
and fauna) communication vocabulary to
abilities of dolphins, account for new
elephants, bees, concepts,
chimpanzees, pine trees experiences, etc.
human-machine Communication with Same as above
machines
human-animal-machine Combining the two Same as above
enhancements above

Table 1: Enhancing communication in general

The question “Can language be enhanced?” assumes two premises: 1)

that language existence in a transhuman world is still valid: in other words,
it is not clear if and how the enhanced human will communicate; and 2)
that we know what language is, where in the brain it resides, how it works
biologically, socially, psychologically, cognitively, etc.
As for the first premise, let’s assume therefore that enhanced humans
will still need some form of verbal communication and will exhibit a
desire to communicate using this form. This idea is not taken for granted
in transhumanist thought. In general, cognitive enhancement (of which
language enhancement would be a part) is defined by Sandberg and
Savulescu as

“the amplification or extension of core capacities of the mind through

improvement or augmentation of internal or external information
processing systems.”19

And yet, what can be enhanced depends greatly on what we deem

language to be, i.e., that our theory of the language faculty is fully
understood and may become a workable base for reconstructing this
faculty. The possibility of language enhancement must probably take into

19
Savulescu, et al., eds., Enhancing, 93.
 Jana Vizmuller-Zocco 55

consideration the internal, innate workings of the language faculty, as well

as the existence of external, historically and socially real, languages.
Peripheral enhancement of historically and socially real languages can
surely benefit from enhancement of the following (see Table 2):

Type of function Enhancement

Production, understanding
Verbalization of concepts,
experiences, etc.
Previous historical stages of
language
Memory
Understanding many speakers at
once
Metaphoric abilities
Cognition
First language acquisition
Foreign language(s) acquisition
Narrative abilities
Brain-to-brain verbal
communication
Real-time translation of spoken
language
Speed up
Increment ideational component,
increase knowledge of words
Access, understand, use
Increase for all language functions
Focus on many voices
Increase combinatorial possibilities
Increase
Speed up
Speed up
Increase verbal language
Increase mirror neuronal function
Increase speed

Table 2: Enhancing communicative/cultural language functions

The need for lexicographers and lexicologists is already keenly felt,

given examples of individuals who yearn to augment their senses by
implants that open up worlds to feelings never before experienced.
Specifically, there are people who received neodymium magnetic implants
in order to perceive electromagnetic fields, a possible example of a sixth
sense. However, these individuals’ descriptions of their feelings are
inarticulate at best (e.g., “tingling feeling”20). A much more specific
terminology is needed if this is to be accepted as a sixth sense experience.
There are at least two ways to manage the coinage of new words for new

20
Ben Popper, “Cyborg America: inside the strange new world of basement body
hackers,” The Verge (August 8, 2012, 10:37 am),
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3177438/cyborg-america-biohackers-grinders-
body-hackers.
56 Language and Literature in Transhumanism

senses: it can be left to lexicographers or be outsourced (see, e.g., the sub-

reddit WTW [what’s the word for]).
The enhancements listed in Table 2 go only slightly beyond the normal
workings of language and they are all connected to other brain functions,
such as memory, auditory and/or cognitive systems, and the articulatory
muscle system.
Although scholars in the field of biolinguistics admit that there exist
wide gaps in knowledge of this field,21 the theory holds that the innate
workings of the language faculty originate in boundless recursivity, but
not everyone agrees with this idea.22 Other properties of language which
are less controversial include semanticity, constituency, compositionality,
generative power, computational bases of rules, discrete infinity,
displacement, arbitrariness and universal grammar. According to Chomsky
and others, the distinguishing feature of human language is the existence
of the internal language faculty which rests on the computational ability of
recursion. If one accepts Chomsky’s hypothesis that the narrow faculty of
language is structurally “perfect”, or “optimal,”23 then no enhancement is
necessary or possible. This is an interesting point worthy to be pursued by
transhumanists as well as linguists: if language is not amenable to
enhancement, it certainly must be a faculty that is unlike any other found
in humans. But it also is, at the same time, extremely vulnerable to being
done away with altogether, or replaced by some other means of
communication more in line with the chosen embodiment of the future
being.
Table 3 looks at the internal workings of language in detail and
attempts to indicate possible enhancements (see Table 3; the question
marks indicate improbable or impossible enhancements).
While some of these characteristics defy enhancement (other than
perhaps improving the sensory-motor interface and the semantic-
conceptual-intentional interface with UG), others involve increase in
speed, reduction of complexity and increase in understanding.

21
Marc D. Hauser, et al., “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and
How Did It Evolve?,” Science 298 (November 22, 2002): 1569-1579.
22
See, e.g., Steve Pinker, and Ray Jackendoff, “The faculty of language: what’s
special about it?,” Cognition 95 (2005): 201–236, and Michael Studdert-Kennedy,
“How did language go discrete?,” in Language Origins – Perspectives on
Evolution, ed. Maggie Tallerman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 48-67.
23
Pinker and Jackendoff, Faculty, 350.
 Jana Vizmuller-Zocco 57

Characteristics/traits/properties Enhancement
of verbal language
Boundless recursivity depends on memory capabilities and
limitations: these have to be
enhanced
Semanticity boost this feature; increase the power
of expressing meaning
Constituency ?
Compositionality ?
Generative power Speed up; avoid garden path
interpretations; do away with
structural ambiguity, etc.
Computational bases of rules Make computations
multidimensional, not linear, i.e.
increase rather than decrease certain
constraints that create
ambiguity/garden path
phenomena/recursive embedding
Discrete infinity ?
Displacement Extend to multi-dimensions
Arbitrariness Construct a system that would make
it not arbitrary
Universal grammar Not have too many parameters
specifying UG

Table 3: Enhancing internal features of verbal language

Enhancement of verbal language must face complexity-reducing

factors in language computation (such as in derivations, phases,
mechanisms restricting possible acquirable grammars). However, it is
possible that language enhancement would actually involve incrementing
all these.
The desirability of linguistic enhancement is questionable since it may
be useless to work towards a situation that may dramatically change. The
future technological developments will doubtless lead to the possibility of
communication without speech (e.g., direct brain-to-brain connections,
different from, however, those mentioned by Hasson et al.;24 see, e.g., the

24
Uri Hasson, et al.,“Brain-to-brain coupling: a mechanism for creating and
sharing a social world,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16, no. 2 (2011): 114-21,
doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2011.12.007.
58 Language and Literature in Transhumanism

discussion in the Transhumanity.net Debate Forum “do we want to be the

borg?”25) - and therefore leading to the disappearance of verbal language
as we know it. However, numerous language features are connected to
other cognitive functions, such as memory or physical and psychological
conditions accompanying old age and certain disabilities and genetic
impairments which prevent smooth communication, and, as a
consequence, improvement in these capacities is certainly desirable.26
There may be some unintended verbal language consequences of
specific enhancements: for example, if neuronal implants with access to
Google become part of the brain, complex or abstract information would
probably need some type of verbal interaction.27 The same can be said
about access to literary texts.
It seems that language faculty enhancement is different from other
foreseen enhancements from a qualitative and quantitative perspective.
First of all, language enhancement would not result in disparity between
the enhanced and the unenhanced, since possessing more numerous
vocabulary items, for example, would not result in greater social
advantage (it may be more important for verbalizations of knowledge to
oneself, though). Secondly, linguistic enhancement has to be internal
therefore bio-nano-technological, it cannot be prosthetic, and therefore it
will also be unseen–unlike, perhaps, some other enhancements. On the
other hand, if the speed of production and perception of language is
increased, the unenhanced would be at a disadvantage: they would not
understand and process language as quickly as the enhanced.
There are interesting possibilities for enhancing language features and
properties. However, rather than asking to what extent transhumanism can
offer enhancement of language, it is more realistic to indicate how our
knowledge of language may provide a constructive critique of
transhumanist thought. Two items are offered here towards this critique:
that of language as a social phenomenon and language as the distinguishing
feature of what it is to be human.

25
Transhumanity.net Debate Forum, “do we want to be the borg?,” posted January
14, 2013, http://transhumanity.net/articles/entry/debate-forum-do-we-want-to-be-
the-borg.
26
For a discussion of specific and general language impairments, see Tim Owen,
“After Postmodernism: Towards an Evolutionary Sociology,” In Reconstructing
Postmodernism: Critical Debates, eds. Jason L. Powell and Tim Owen (New
York: Nova Science Publishers, 2007), 159-160.
27
See Google Project Glass,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4&feature=youtu.be.
 Jana Vizmuller-Zocco 59

1. Language is a social phenomenon and therefore it is culturally

transmitted
Transhumanists do not concern themselves with the question of
sociability: in other words, they do not entertain the possibility that
enhanced beings will be not be as social as humans have been so far. It is
possible to think that in a transhumanist world, social beings will be
replaced by solitary beings. It is accepted widely (but see Chomsky’s
statement that “language is for knowledge, not for communication”) that
language is social (see Saussure and many before and after him): therefore,
if transhumanists work towards improving the human condition, the
question is whether improving the social aspect of language is one of their
missions. The basic question remains: Will enhancement benefit the
individual or society as a whole?
In any case, culture and human interactions made a learnable system
which is expressive;28 expressiveness makes it also less optimal in
Chomsky’s reading–will transhumanists accept the untidiness of
expressiveness? Will they enhance it or will they do away with it?

2. Language as a distinguishing feature of what it is to be human

There is no need to emphasize the fact that verbal language is without
exception listed among the most distinguishing features of what it is to be
human. If the enhanced being uses verbal language, will it/he/she still be
human? More than a decade ago Pepperell underscored the fact that “our
traditional view of what constitutes a human being is now undergoing a
profound transformation”29 even without including language in this
consideration. And, most important of all, will the enhanced being still
possess means of asking questions of responsibility?30 Are humans simply
information systems? Can verbal language enhancement contribute to
ameliorating the human condition?
If enhancement of linguistic organs and functions is fraught with
difficulties not least because we do not have a fully workable theory of
language, radical enhancement of literary abilities brings even more
questions. Is there a literary faculty (parallel to “language faculty”), or is
there even a narrative capacity? For the moment, we have no answer to

28
Thomas C. Scott-Phillips and Simon Kirby, “Language evolution in the
laboratory,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 14, no. 9 (2010): 415, doi:
10.1016/j.tics.2010.06.006.
29
Robert Pepperell, The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness beyond the brain
(Bristol and Portland: Intellect Books, 2003), iv.
30
See Bradley B. Onishi, “Information, Bodies, and Heidegger: Tracing Visions of
the Posthuman,” Sophia 50, no. 1 (2011): 110, doi: 10.1007/s11841-010-0214-4.
60 Language and Literature in Transhumanism

these questions. If enhancement means adding extra power or skill or

capacity to a previously existing organ or system, then adding a few more
characters to a novel or reconfiguring the temporal sequences of actions or
re-elaborating the verbal code will not bring about literary enhancement.
Similarly to the question of language enhancement, literary enhancement
points in the direction of different or additional features of cognition and
senses perception. The enhanced being will with most probability still
enjoy a great story, but the definition of “great” will radically change
depending on the enhancements received. It was argued that the function
of good stories is ethical: they make us good citizens;31 story-telling and
reading has a number of functions, many of which will not be relevant to
the enhanced being, although it may be crucial for understanding where
the enhanced originated. It is conceivable that teaching to cope with pain
or aging will not be relevant in a society that does not know pain or does
not age, just as teaching to be a good citizen without there being a political
state/nation does not make any sense. Still, it is also arguable that knowing
about pain and aging or good citizenship may make the enhanced a much
more nuanced being.
In conclusion, situating transhumanism within two recent cultural
perspectives may illustrate the movement’s strengths and weakness.
Transhumanism shares some of its tenets with modernity, others with
postmodernity. Its alignment with modernity stems from a boundless
belief in technoscientific progress, goals to work towards, hope in the
power of reason, and, above all, a status-quo regarding the unbalanced
social and political inequalities. It is, after all, a grand narrative, one of
those that Lyotard thought so characteristic of modernity. Transhumanists
also reinforce the view that “aging reinforces capitalism,”32 in that aging,
or better, the ills of aging have to be fought by all available
technoscientific means.
The inclusion of transhumanist thought within a postmodern frame of
understanding originates in questioning the truthfulness of certain deeply
entrenched beliefs (some of them last bastions of stable aspects of nature),
such as the inevitability of suffering and death, impossibility of
overcoming biological limitations, fear of “otherness.” It also promotes
indeterminacy of technological singularity, fragmentation of possibilities
of choice (of augmentation, nano- and genomic interventions, etc.),

31
Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
32
Moody quoted in Steven L. Arxer et al., “Temporality and Old Age: A
Postmodern Critique,” in Reconstructing Postmodernism: Critical Debates, eds.
Jason L. Powell and Tim Owen (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2007), 130.
 Jana Vizmuller-Zocco 61

fluidity of identity, decreased commitment to any specific person,

ideology, thing, etc., consumerist-type self-modification. Transhumanism
falls prey to the anti-aging images to the extreme: in fact, for them, the
disembodied brain is the way out, therefore, no bodily form is necessary
for happiness. In this way, stimulation of fantasies, arousing desires and
reproducing a craving or compulsion to consumers33 is magnified to the
utmost. The dictum “We have no choice but to choose”34 is more than
appropriate here.
The topic transhumanism does not share with either modernity or
postmodernity is verbal language and literary works: structuralism and
deconstructionism, great works of literature and logocentricity, these are
the hallmarks of modernity and postmodernity. Transhumanism avoids
tackling the issue of language and literature altogether. Therefore, linguists
and literary critics have lots to contribute to the discussion transhumanists
have been engaged in for more than twenty years now, least of which are
questions leading to understanding what is valuable to any life (ethically,
economically, imaginatively, etc.) and therefore if that value is likely to be
enhanced. The question “What is uncyborgable?”35 can be rephrased by
asking “What is unenhanceable?” For now, the answer is language and
narrative capacity. Not because both are perfect; on the contrary, because
both can be “distorted” but not lose meaning;36 they are stable but also
instable, systematic but also vulnerable, unpredictable and ambiguous.
Their interpretation is based on inference whose meaning originates in
context but takes advantage of flights of fancy. But language and literature
are “reliable enough.”37 Interestingly, for transhumanists, “good enough”
is not good enough: they opt for perfection.
To achieve some sense of balance, nevertheless, linguists and literary
critics have to collaborate in the transhumanist discussion, and, at the same
time, transhumanists have to be aware of concerns that go beyond

33
The following is about identity formation, but can be extended to
transhumanism: Barry Smart, “(Dis)interring Postmodernism or a Critique on the
Political Economy of Consumer Choice,” in Reconstructing Postmodernism:
Critical Debates edited by Jason L. Powell and Tim Owen (New York: Nova
Science Publishers, 2007), 172.
34
Smart, (Dis)interring, 174.
35
Chris Hables Gray, “Cyborging the Posthuman: Participatory Evolution,” in The
Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological
Challenges, edited by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and
Jacob Wamberg (Copenhagen: Aarhus University Press, 2012), 30.
36
Ellen Spolsky, “Darwin and Derrida: Cognitive Literary Theory As a Species of
Post-Structuralism,” Poetics Today 23, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 50.
37
Ibid., 51.
62 Language and Literature in Transhumanism

efficiency and singularity, i.e., those that keep linguists and literary critics
occupied. To be fair, perhaps the lack of interest about language and
literature on the part of transhumanists stems from the fact that no
workable hypotheses about language and narrative faculty exist.
Moreover, one of the major hurdles in transhumanist thinking relates to
forecasting the distant future being; transhumanists keep repeating that
predicting what issues will face the enhanced beings, and what possible
and unintended consequences enhancements will bring about, is
impossible. This equates either with shirking of responsibilities or futility
of responding to manipulability of meanings: in both cases, it illustrates
the lack of concern for and knowledge about language and literary
imagination. This lack of knowledge is due to the misuses of language and
artistic avoidance of language, especially when the human and technology
interact. An example of this may suffice: Gert Balling exalts Stelarc’s
performance Ping Body. Digital Aesthetics by claiming that

“in the midst of his wild set up–this poetic grotesque–he is living and
experiencing being that feels joy, grief, desire, pain etc., acting out a
cultural expression.”38

It is of utmost importance here that this performance lacks any verbal

interaction, it is totally language-less for the spectator. Therefore, a
technologically-minded spectator assumes there is no need for language,
other than that which connects the artist to the machine, which is not
verbal communication of the social kind at all. A similar observation can
be made about other performances which bring together human and animal
subjects, such as those of Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin. It may
well be that “the human imagination … shapes our future, nothing
unimagined comes into being.”39 But imagination also requires, at some
very crucial points, in order to be really understood, shared, utilized and
critiqued, a specific language which expresses novel circumstances,
actions, ideas, just as a great work of fiction does.

38
Gert Balling, “Artistic Consequences of Technology Insinuating Itself into the
Human Body,” in The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of
Biotechnological Challenges, edited by Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Mads
Rosendahl Thomsen and Jacob Wamberg (Copenhagen: Aarhus University Press,
2012), 138.
39
Hables Gray, Cyborging, 33.
 AUTO-MODERNITY AFTER POSTMODERNISM:
AUTONOMY AND AUTOMATION IN CULTURE,
TECHNOLOGY, AND EDUCATION

BOB SAMUELS

This chapter argues that in order to understand what happens after

postmodernity, we have to rethink many of the cultural oppositions that
have shaped the Western tradition since the start of the modern era. To be
precise, we can no longer base our analysis of culture, identity, and
technology on the traditional conflicts between the public and the private,
the subject and the object, and the human and the machine. Moreover, the
modern divide pitting the isolated individual against the impersonal realm
of technological mechanization no longer seems to apply to the multiple
ways people are using new media and technologies. In fact, I will argue
here that we have moved into a new cultural period of automodernity, and
a key to this cultural epoch is the combination of technological automation
and human autonomy. Thus, instead of seeing individual freedom and
mechanical predetermination as opposing social forces, people today turn
to automation in order to express their autonomy, and this bringing
together of former opposites results in a radical restructuring of traditional
and modern intellectual paradigms. Furthermore, the combining of human
and machine into a single circuit of interactivity often functions to exclude
the traditional roles of social mediation and the public realm. For
educators and public policy makers, this unexpected collusion of opposites
represents one of the defining challenges for the twenty-first century, and
it will be my argument here that some innovative uses of new technologies
threaten to undermine educational and social structures that are still
grounded on the modern divide between the self and the other, the
objective and the subjective, and the original and the copy. To help clarify
what challenges automodernity brings, I will detail ways that new media
technologies are shaping how we learn and play, then I will discuss how
these automodern technologies challenge contemporary theories
concerning education and selfhood, and I will conclude by suggesting
64 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

different techniques for the integration of old and new media in education
and political culture.

Four Versions of Postmodernity

Before I develop my notion of automodernity, I want to first clarify
how we can understand postmodernity. While some people have sought to
dismiss the whole idea of postmodernity by labeling it an intellectual fad
or a nihilistic radical movement, my intention is to show that postmodernism
describes a series of contemporary social transformations.1To be more
precise, I want to rescue this term from its misuse by arguing that there are
in fact four separate forms of postmodernity that have often been confused.
Perhaps the most important postmodern idea is the notion that our
world is made of multiple cultures and that we should respect the
knowledge and cultures of diverse communities. In fact, multiculturalism
is a reflection of the important social movements of the twentieth century,
which fought for civil rights, minority rights, women’s rights, workers’
rights, and political self-determination. Thus, in recognizing the vital
values and historical contributions of diverse social groups, multiculturalists
have posited that there is no single, universal source for knowledge or
truth.2 Unfortunately, this multicultural idea has often been confused with
the extreme postmodernist notion that there are no truths or moral values
since everything is relative to one’s own culture.3 This mode of cultural
relativism is often a caricature of the more subtle idea that all truths and
values are socially constructed. Therefore, a more accurate statement of
multicultural relativism and social constructivism is that while there are
truths and values in our world, we can no longer assume that they are
universal and eternal, particularly when “universal and eternal” often
function as code words for “white and male.”4

1
One of the most popular criticisms of postmodernism can be found in Alan
Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon, 1987).
2
The work of Homi Bhabha has shown a strong recognition of the role of multiple
cultures and social movements in the postmodern challenging of modern
universalism and European ethnocentrism.
3
It is hard to cite sources for the extreme form of postmodern relativism since it is
often the critics of postmodernism who have defined this extremist position. A
strong example of a critic who has insisted on an extreme version of postmodern
relativism is Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education.
4
Many of the first strong theories of social construction can be derived from
Saussure’s work in linguistics and Claude Levi-Strauss’s work in anthropology.
 Bob Samuels 65

Besides multiculturalism and social constructivism, a third mode of

postmodernity concerns the cultural model of combining diverse cultures
in entertainment and art through the processes of collage, re-mixing, and
sampling. On one level, we can say that all cultures feed off of other
cultures; however, some people have rightly claimed that our incessant
recombining of diverse cultural representations does not necessarily help
us to understand or encounter other cultural worlds.5 I would add that
while this aesthetic version of postmodernity is probably the most
prevalent, it is also the easiest to dismiss for its tendency to be superficial
and short-lived.
Finally, I would like to define a fourth form of postmodernity, which
concerns the academic critique of modern culture and philosophy. This
mode of academic discourse often comes under the title of deconstruction
or post-structuralism and has been attacked for offering the extreme idea
that our world is determined by language, but language can never escape
its own domain, and thus ultimately all knowledge and meaning is
suspect.6 While this overly generalized representation of postmodern
philosophy can be questioned, what is often missed is the way that this
theory of rhetoric has worked to hide the important connection between
postmodernity and social movements. After all, what has fueled
multiculturalism and the critique of modernity is the rise of collective
action around minority rights, civil rights, and women’s rights. These
social movements of the twentieth century have challenged many of the
presuppositions of modern culture, and it is important to not confuse these
vital cultural changes with their reflection in various academic fashions.
Indeed, many of those most involved with these social movements as
activists or theorists have challenged the extreme focus on difference
within postmodernism, positing instead a kind of navigation between
“sameness” and “difference.”
It is also essential to emphasize that if we want people to use new
media to engage in the social and public realms, then we must be able to
point to the social movements of postmodernity without being caught up
in the more extreme forms of academic discourse. In short, while we show

These social science works were imported into the humanities in Jacques Derrida’s
early work.
5
One of the earliest theorists to connect collage and cultural re-mixing to
postmodernity was Frederick Jameson.
6
While the work of Jacques Derrida has been blamed for ushering the extreme
cultural relativism into Western philosophy and literary studies, I would argue that
it has often been his followers and imitators who have offered a less nuanced and
more generalized mode of postmodern extremism.
66 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

how culture, knowledge, and subjectivity are influenced by important

social forces, we need to avoid the pitfalls of promoting theories that
destroy the foundations for any type of stable meaning, argument, or social
action. Moreover, as I will stress below, since one of the determining
aspects of automodernity is that the seemingly seamless combination of
autonomy and automation often excludes the social realm of cultural
differences and collective action, we need to show the importance of the
social realm in contemporary, postmodern culture.

Postmodern Theories of Education and Society

In surveying several texts defining postmodernity from the perspective
of multiple disciplines, I have found that the one consistent factor in the
circumscribing of this historical period is a stress on the transition from the
modern notion of Enlightenment reason to an emphasis on the social
nature of all human endeavors. Thus, whether one is speaking about the
contemporary loss of master narratives, the critique of universal science,
the rise of multiculturalism, the downgrading of the nation state, the
emergence of the global information economy, the mixing of high and low
culture, the blending of entertainment and economics, or the development
of new communication technologies, one is dealing with an essentially
social and anti-modern discourse. According to this logic, modernity
represents the rise of capitalism, science, and democracy through the
rhetoric of universal reason and equality. Moreover, the modern period is
seen as a reaction to the pre-modern stress on feudal hierarchy, religious
fate, cosmic belief, and political monarchy.7 This coherent narrative
moving from pre-modern to modern to postmodern modes of social order
and collective knowledge can be challenged and debated, but what is
certain is that this schema plays a dominant mode in contemporary
intellectual history. However, what I would now like to show through an
analysis of the representation of modernity and postmodernity in various
fields of study is that this prominent intellectual narrative does not help us
to account for the major modes of subjectivity and culture employed by
people today, which I have labeled automodernity.
In the field of education, the movement from modernity to
postmodernity has often been tied to a belated acknowledgement of the

7
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil (New York: Verso, 1993), Zygmunt
Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989),
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London and Newbury Park,
CA: Sage Publications, 1992), Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).
 Bob Samuels 67

multiple cultures that make up our world in general and our educational
populations in particular. For example, Marilyn Cooper has argued that the
central guiding force behind the development of postmodernism in
education is the acknowledgement of cultural diversity:

“Postmodernism is, above all, a response to our increased awareness of the

great diversity in human cultures, a diversity that calls into question the
possibility of any "universal" or "privileged" perspective and that thus
values the juxtaposition of different perspectives and different voices and
the contemplation of connections rather than a subordinated structure of
ideas that achieves a unified voice and a conclusive perspective.”8

By stressing cultural diversity and "the contemplation of connections,"

Cooper points to a social and cultural mode of postmodern education
challenging the modern stress on universality and unified subjectivity.
Therefore, in this context, postmodern theory can be read as a response to
multicultural diversity and the juxtaposition of different voices and
disciplines in an environment where social mediation trumps universal
reason and individual autonomy.9
Like so many other theorists of postmodernity, Cooper's understanding
of this epoch is based on the idea that our conceptions of what knowledge
is have shifted away from the previous modern stress on universal truth
and unified individualism:
The transition involves a shift from the notion of knowledge as an
apprehension of universal truth and its transparent representation in
language by rational and unified individuals to the notion of knowledge as
the construction in language of partial and temporary truth by multiple and
internally contradictory individuals.10
According to this common academic argument, the movement away
from the "modern" conception of knowledge as universal truth pushes
people in postmodern culture and education to sift through competing
forces of temporary truths, and this destabilized conception of knowledge
and truth leads to the undermining of the modern individual of unified
consciousness. In turn, under the influences of postmodernism, education

8
Marilyn Cooper, “Postmodern Pedagogy in Electronic Conversations,” in
Passions, Pedagogy, and 21st Century Technologies, edited by Gail E. Hawisher
and Cynthia L. Selfe, (Logan: Utah State UP, 1999), 142.
9
While it may seem that Cooper’s stress on the connection of diverse voices helps
to explain my example above of the unexpected use by students of technology for
collaboration, I argue here that automodern collaboration should not be confused
with the postmodern stress on public and social mediation.
10
Cooper, Pedagogy, 143.
68 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

and culture become social and non-universal.

This social definition of postmodernism is linked by Cooper to the role
played by new computer-mediated modes of communication in culture and
education: "in electronic conversations, the individual thinker moves . . .
into the multiplicity and diversity of the social world, and in social
interaction tries out many roles and positions."11 According to this
description of electronic discussions, new technologies help to create a
situation where individuals enter into a multicultural environment that
stresses the social, dialogical, and interactive foundations of knowledge,
communication, and education. However, I will later argue that this
emphasis on the social nature of new communication technologies does
not take into account the contemporary dominance of automation and
individual autonomy in the production of automodernity. Moreover, due to
their desire to promote a more socially responsible and multi-cultural
society, many educators have made the questionable assumption that
networked collaboration equals an acceptance of cultural diversity and
social responsibility. Not only do I think that this easy equivalency
between new technologies and multicultural awareness is too simple, but I
will argue that many new technologies can foster a highly anti-multicultural
mode of communication and actually inhibit an understanding of or
experience of difference.
Another serious problem with the theories stressing a radical shift from
modern universal reason to postmodern social mediation is that they are
predicated on a strict linear conception of historical development, and this
progressive model tends to ignore the continuation of modern and pre-
modern influences in postmodern culture. An example of this common
mode of argumentation can be found in the “new science” idea that we are
now witnessing a radical shift in the transition from modern universal
knowledge to the postmodern stress on the social construction of truth.
Thus in George Howard's understanding of the conflict between
objectivism and constructivism in the natural sciences, we find the
postmodern critique of modern universality:

“All across the intellectual landscape, the forces of objectivism are yielding
to the entreaties of constructivist thought. But it is rather surprising that
even our notion of science has been radically altered by recent
constructivist thought. Briefly objectivism believes in a freestanding
reality, the truth about which can eventually be discovered. The
constructivist assumes that all mental images are creations of people, and
thus speak of an invented reality. Objectivists focus on the accuracy of

11
Ibid.
 Bob Samuels 69

their theories, whereas constructivists think of the utility of their models.

Watzlawick (1984) claimed that the shift from objectivism to
constructivism involves a growing awareness that any so-called reality is -
in the most immediate and concrete sense - the construction of those who
believe they have discovered and investigated it.”12

According to this social constructivist interpretation of the sciences,

the modern conception of knowledge as being universal and objective has
been challenged by the postmodern notion that knowledge is always an act
of interpretation and invention.13 Furthermore, by seeing science as the
formation of shared constructed versions of reality, postmodern scientists
often take on a social and anti-individualistic conception of reality.
This contemporary movement in the sciences from the modern
individual as neutral observer to the postmodern social construction of
accepted theories is linked to the rhetorical turn in all aspects of current
academic culture. In fact, Alan Ryan (2000) has made the following
argument about how postmodern rhetoric changes our definitions of the
self and the very process of recording our perceptions:

“Postmodernism is a label that embraces multitudes, but two ideas

especially relevant here are its skepticism about the amount of control that
a writer exercises over his or her work, and a sharp sense of the fragility of
personal identity. These interact, of course. The idea that each of us is a
single Self consorts naturally with the idea that we tell stories, advance
theories, and interact with others from one particular viewpoint. Skepticism
about such a picture of our identities consorts naturally with the thought
that we are at the mercy of the stories we tell, as much as they are at our
mercy. It also consorts naturally with an inclination to emphasize just how
accidental it is that we hold the views we do, live where we do, and have
the loyalties we do.”14

Here, individual autonomy is seen as something that has to be

constantly negotiated and revised and is thus not a finished product, and
this conception of subjectivity feeds into the social definition of
postmodernity. However, as my students often posit in reaction to these

12
George Howard, “Culture Tales,” American Psychologist, 46, no. 3 (1990), 187.
13
I have found that many students reject this type of argument because they
believe that science is neutral and objective and not subject to cultural and
historical influences. Students, and many academics, also tend to confuse social
constructivism with subjectivism.
14
Alan Ryan, cited in Lawrence W. Sherman in “Postmodern Constructivist
Pedagogy for Teaching and Learning Cooperatively on the Web,”
CyberPsychology & Behavior 3, no. 1 (Feb. 2000): 51–57.
70 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

postmodern notions of social construction, they do not feel that their

autonomy and selfhood are being challenged and rendered transitory; in
fact, students most often report a high level of perceived individual control
and freedom.15 Furthermore, the conflict between how students experience
their own lives and how postmodern theorists describe contemporary
subjectivity often works to make students simply reject these academic
theories, and this student resistance to theory is one reason why we may
want to rethink postmodernism through the development of automodernism.
Thus, as academics are concentrating on critiquing modern notions of
universal reason and unified subjectivity, students are turning to modern
science and technology to locate a strong sense of individual unity and
control. However, I am not arguing here that we should simply reject all
postmodern academic theories because they do not match our students’
experiences and perceptions; rather my point is that we should use these
students’ resistances to better understand how people today are influenced
by the technological access to a heightened sense to individual control that
can downplay social subjectivity and multicultural differences. Therefore,
by seeing what postmodern theories have gotten wrong in the under-
estimating of virtual subjectivity, we can gain a better idea of what new
educational theories need to get right. For instance, in fully articulating
both a social and a psychological theory of student subjectivity, we can
show why it is important to defend the social realm at the same time that
we expose the reasons why new media caters to a psychological
downplaying of social mediation.
In fact, what the social or postmodern theory of selfhood tends to
neglect is the psychological and virtual foundation of autonomy and
subjective unity. It is important to stress that if we examine how the sense
of self is developed psychologically, we learn that one first gains a sense
of individual identity by looking into a mirror or external representation
and seeing an ideal representation of one’s body as complete, whole, and
bounded. This mirror theory of selfhood (Lacan) teaches us that since we
never really see our whole body at a single glance—at least not without
several mirrors or cameras—our internal body map is actually an
internalized virtual image and not a concrete material fact. In other words,
our sense of self is psychological and virtual and not primarily social and
material. Moreover, our subjective feelings of autonomy are built upon
this imaginary level of selfhood: to have a sense of self-direction, one
must first have a sense of self, and to have a self, one needs to first

15
A central reason why students do not feel that their sense of self is being
undermined by postmodern society is that the self is a psychological and virtual
entity that is not strictly determined by social forces.
 Bob Samuels 71

internalize an ideal body map.

Social theories of subjectivity are thus misleading when they claim to
depict a generalized undermining of unified subjectivity; yet, these same
theories are vital when we want to discuss the possibility of social and
cultural change. In the case of automodernity, I will be arguing that the
power of new automated technologies to give us a heightened sense of
individual control often functions to undermine the awareness of social
and cultural mediation, and this lack of awareness can place the isolating
individual against the public realm. Therefore, when my students reject
postmodern theories because these self-denying concepts do not jive with
their own self-understandings, we can posit that students and postmodern
theories are both failing to distinguish between psychological and social
models of subjectivity. In other terms, many of the postmodern theories
discussed here stress the social determination of subjectivity, while many
contemporary students focus on their sense of psychological determinism,
and we need to offer models of education that integrate both perspectives.
However, instead of balancing the social and the psychological,
postmodern educators like Lester Faigley posit that the contemporary
subject is defined as being multiple, and identity is seen as a process. In
turn, this postmodern notion of subjectivity is contrasted with the
Enlightenment ideology of subjective unity, coherency, objectivity,
individuality, and universal scientific reason.16 Moreover, for Faigley,
postmodern culture and new media technologies challenge these modern
ideologies by emphasizing the contingent and social nature of all acts of
writing and knowledge construction.17 It is also important to note that from
Faigley's perspective, there is a growing divide between postmodern
students and modern teachers in the ways students and teachers tend to
understand the functions and roles of writing, technology, and literacy in
culture and education. While I do agree with Faigley that new technologies
help to build a growing divide between teachers and students in terms of
how they conceive knowledge, identity, and media, my conception of
automodernity argues that the simple replacement of modern individual
unity with postmodern discontinuity fails to see how people are merging
the two sides of the modern divide: unified individuality and universal
science. For example, in a prize winning essay from the Global Kids
contest on Digital Literacy, we find an author making the following
argument:

16
Lester Faigley, Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of
Composition (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 4-7.
17
Faigley, Fragments, 8.
72 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

“Today, almost all the information that humans have gathered over
thousands of years is at the tips of my fingers…or those of anyone who
cares to use this incredible technology.”18,19

On the one hand, this statement points to a heightened sense of

individual control and access, and on the other hand, it highlights a
universal notion of information and technology. By stating that “anyone”
can get almost “any” information from the Web, this writer universalizes
both the subject and object of global information distribution. The Internet
is positioned here as using automation and modern science to enhance the
ability of individuals to access all information. Of course, this common
conception of universal access on the World Wide Web represses many
real digital divides as it presents a universalized notion of individuality,
and it is important to note that one possible reason for this rhetorical
neglect of differences is that the power of automation tends to render
invisible social and material factors.
The same essay indicates a possible source for this common
contemporary rhetoric of universal access:

Of all the media that I use, I have only touched a spoonful of the ocean that
is digital media. There are still thousands upon thousands of other sites,
games, songs, and other things that I have never used and probably never
will use. Every day, though, I find that I need some obscure piece of
information, and this new technology allows me to find it. I play games
and listen to music, and this helps define what I like and don’t like.20

This person feels that since there is too much information available on
the Web for one person to encounter, then all information must be
available: here, information excess leads to a sense of universal access.
Furthermore, it is often the automated nature of new media that functions
to hide social disparities behind a veil of easy, global access. In turn, this
automation and autonomy of access heightens a sense of individual
control. Thus, what postmodern critics like Faigley might be missing in
their accounts of contemporary people is the power of new technologies to

18
Mike H., “From Gutenberg to Gateway,” Grand Prize Essay submitted in 2006
Global Kids Digital Media Essay Contest, http://olpglobalkids.org/content/dmec-
grand-prize-essay-gutenberg-gateway.
19
Essays from the 2006 Global Kids Digital Media Essay Contest can be accessed
at http://olpglobalkids.org/search/node/Digital%20Media%20Essay%20Contest.
This contest asked students from all over the world to write about their diverse
experiences using new media.
20
H., Gutenberg.
 Bob Samuels 73

reinforce the imaginary and real experiences of individual autonomy

through automated systems. In other terms, even in situations where
information on the Web is determined by social mediation, people are able
to absorb cultural material into to the frames of their individual point of
view. As I will argue below, the PC often gives people the sense that they
are in control of the information that appears on their screen, just as they
are in control of the perceptions that they let into their own consciousness.
Another important clarification to make is the connection between
universal science and automation. In the common understanding of
modern science and culture, academics and philosophers often claim that
science is universal because it does not rely on social or personal beliefs.
In fact, a key to Descartes’ development of the scientific method is his call
to employ universal doubt to undermine all prejudices and approach every
object of study with a shared transparent method open to all. Of course,
Descartes developed his method as a counter to the dominant religious
beliefs of his time, and central to his understanding of science was his
investment in the idea of universal reason. While we may want to applaud
the democratic and rational foundations of Descartes’ universal approach,
it is important to also note that this universalizing model of science, which
posits the importance of a “value-free” method, can actually free scientists
from ethical and social responsibility. Furthermore, in the application of
modern science through the development of new technologies, we see how
automated devices may create a responsibility-free zone where it is hard to
locate any responsible ethical subject.
What then often accounts for the connection between universal science
and new automated technologies is the shared process of downplaying the
role of social contexts in the shaping of science and technology. Within
the context of education, science and math are usually taught as if these
subjects were purely objective and neutral and therefore void of any
individual or social influences. For example, even when teachers are
discussing such issues as genetic manipulation, pharmaceutical
intervention, and technological innovation, the knowledge is delivered
without concern for ethical and social issues. Here we see a division
between the postmodern stress on social mediation and the modern
rhetoric of science as being objective, neutral, universal, and ultimately
inevitable.
We can further understand the presence of modern universality in
contemporary education by looking at how literacy is defined in many
higher education institutions. Thus, in ReInventing the University:
Literacies and Legitimacy in the Postmodern University, Christopher
Schroeder posits that most textbooks and governmental policies present, "a
74 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

universalized definition of literacy, as if what it means to be literate can be

separated from the contexts in which literate practices are meaningful."21
In this critique of the common use of the term literacy, Schroeder affirms
the distinction between a functional and a critical understanding of literacy
by distinguishing the modern stress on universal neutrality from the
postmodern stress on social context. From Schroeder's postmodern
perspective, the myth of a universal model of literacy is derived from the
ability of powerful vested interests to hide their own particular values
behind false claims of universal objectivity. Moreover, Schroeder posits
that this rhetoric of universality still dominates the ways our educational
systems are structured and the types of literacy that are affirmed in
schooling.22 It is also important to note how this universalizing rhetoric
has been adopted by people in their common claims of global access, and
therefore a key task of critical literacy studies is to explore with students
these rhetorical constructions that function to hide important differences
and discrepancies. For instance, when students claim that, “Anyone can
access any information from any place at any time,” we need to engage
them in a conversation about the role of the word “any” in falsely
universalizing and globalizing a rhetoric of unquestioned equality. In other
words, we need to counter a functional model of technological literacy
with a critical model of rhetorical understanding.
In fact, essential to Schroeder's analysis of the conflict between
functional and critical models of literacy is his claim that the more school
literacies are based on de-contextualized, universal models of information
delivery, the more individual aspects of culture become the sole purview
of experts.23 Thus, central to the modern organization of education is the
dual process of universalizing educational access to school and
segmenting individual subject areas into separate areas of expertise.
Furthermore, from Schroeder's perspective, functional literacy is dominated
by the modern ideological interests of white, middle-class America, and
these modern values, which are presented as being universal, no longer fit
with the majority of contemporary students.24
In opposition to the modern stress on universal reason and neutral
functional models of literacy, Schroeder affirms that students bring
multiple literacies to universities, and these diverse models of social
knowledge and learning are most often neglected by our traditional

21
Schroeder, ReInventing (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001), 2.
22
Ibid., 3.
23
Ibid., 5.
24
Ibid., 6.
 Bob Samuels 75

institutions.25 As many other scholars have argued,26 postmodern student

literacies are shaped by the cultural realms of television, movies, the
Internet, and advertising, and not by the modern emphasis on books and
reading as the central source of literacy.27 While I do feel that Schroeder
and other postmodern critics are correct in seeing this conflict between
older and newer models of literacy, the stress on the modern universality
of school-based literacies versus postmodern diversity of student literacies
does not account for the spread of globalized media in automodernity. In
other terms, new media technologies have absorbed modern universality
into the globalized structures of automated systems, which in turn act to
hide social mediation and to highlight individual control. Therefore, as I
will argue below, automodern literacies based on television, advertising,
movies and the Internet do not typically function to undermine people’s
belief in modern universal reason and unified subjectivity; instead,
automodern technologies help to provide a greater sense of technological
neutrality, universalized information, and individual power, even if this
sense may be illusory.

Automodernity
To clarify what I mean by automodernism, I will examine several
common technologies that are used heavily by people in the early
twentieth-first century globalized Western world: personal computers,
word processors, cell phones, iPods, blogs, remote-controlled television,
and first-person shooter computer games. These technological objects
share a common emphasis on combining together a high level of
mechanical automation with a heightened sense of personal autonomy.28 In
fact, this unexpected and innovative combination of autonomy and
automation can be read as the defining contradictions of contemporary life
in general and people in particular. Importantly, while automation

25
Ibid., 7.
26
Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life
(New York: Basic Books, 1991), Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of
Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1992), Henry A. Giroux, “Slacking
Off: Border Youth and Postmodern Education,” Journal of Advanced Composition
14, no. 2 (Fall 1994), 347-366.
27
Schroeder, ReInventing, 10.
28
A major problem with my analysis is that it tends to hide the real economic
divisions in our culture that prevent many young people from having access to the
same technologies. However, I still feel that the technologies I will be discussing
are used by a majority of students who end up going to college.
76 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

traditionally represents a loss of personal control, autonomy has been

defined by an increase in individual freedom; however, automodernity
constantly combines these two opposing forces in an unexpected way.29
We can begin our analysis of this strange combination of autonomy
and automation in automodernity by analyzing the automobile as the
precursor to this new way of being. In fact, the very name of the auto-
mobile indicates a technological push for both the autonomy and
automation of movement. Moreover, cars represent a truly non-social
mode of movement that conflict with the more social modes of public
transportation. Thus, in the contemporary car, the driver not only has the
feeling that he or she can go where he or she intends, but there is also the
development of a heightened sense of personal control and autonomy.
After all, in American popular culture, the automobile is one of the central
symbols for freedom, mobility, and independence: it is the car that allows
the teen-ager and the angry adult to escape personal alienation and set-off
for individual autonomy.
The automobile also creates the sense of a personal environment where
technology enables a controlled world full of processed air, artificial
sounds, and windowed vision. The car may even be experienced as a
second body, and even though many people spend so much of their time
stuck in traffic, the car retains the virtual and psychological sense of
automated autonomy. In fact, by analyzing the cultural and psychological
import of the car, we can begin to see some of the limits of the postmodern
notion that contemporary society is founded on the social construction of
reality, the overcoming of individual unity, and the critique of universal
science. For the car as an early sign of automodernity is a vehicle for non-
social mode of personal freedom combined with a strong belief in the
naturalness of scientific technology: cars are experienced as artificial
bodies that combine automation with autonomy and seem to render
invisible most forms of social and cultural mediation.
While the automobile appears to be a prime technology of modernity, I
would like to posit that it embodies the seeds to automodernity through its
integration of privacy and automation and its downplaying of social
mediation. In fact, Raymond Williams coined the term “Mobile
Privatization” to indicate how this type of technology, unlike the
telegraph, the radio, and the subway, allows for mobility in a personalized

29
Throughout the 19th and 20th century, the mechanized assembly line is often seen
as the ultimate example of how automation alienates people and takes away their
sense of personal autonomy.
 Bob Samuels 77

and privatized milieu.30 We can thus posit that the automobile has helped
to lay the cultural groundwork for the new stress on autonomy through
mechanical automation.
Like automobiles, personal computers indicate a paradoxical
combination of individual autonomy and automated mechanics. While
some of the postmodern theorists discussed above argue that computers
and other modes of new media allow for a high level of social and cultural
interaction, and thus these new communication technologies help people to
see how the world is based on social mediation and intersubjective
communication, we can also understand these machines as central sources
for an anti-social sense of personal control and autonomy. Therefore, in
the PC, the world comes to me: Not only can I bring my office to my
home, but electronic commerce and email allow me to escape from the
need to engage with people in a public space. This privatization of public
interaction echoes the larger political movement to undermine the notion
of a modern public realm protected by a centralized government (The
Welfare State). In short, the PC has unexpectedly enabled people the
freedom to avoid the public and to appropriate public information and
space for unpredictable personal reasons. Furthermore, even when students
are engaged in collaborative writing online, the power of the PC to
personalize culture can turn this social interaction into a privatized
experience. Thus, while it may appear that new communication
technologies are actually broadening the social realm of peoples, I am
arguing that the ability of the individual user of new media to control the
flow and intake of information provides a strong anti-social and self-
reinforcing sense of subjectivity. For example, it is clear that students who
are participating in an online discussion or chat room are free to read and
respond to only the conversations that interest them or cater to their own
individual points of view; however, in a classroom discussion, it is much
harder for students to only respond to one person or to just respond to their
own ideas over and over again.
It is important to point out here that my argument is not that new
technologies are replacing the social realm with the private realm; rather, I
want to stress that the power of new media to cater to real and imagined
feelings of self-direction threatens to hide and render invisible important
social and public forces. Therefore, although it is essential to consider the
social construction of new technologies and their usages, we need to start
off with a heightened attention to and analysis of the subjective and

30
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London:
Fontana, 1974).
78 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

embodied nature of electronic culture in order to understand how new

media is being lived and experienced by people. In fact, one way of re-
reading the initials PC is to think of Personal Culture as a new mode of
privatized social subjectivity. The feelings of personal choice and power
that digital technologies so powerfully proffer are at least as important of
an on object of investigation and critical reflection as the social networks
they may enable. Perhaps the ultimate technology of personal culture is the
laptop computer, which functions as the logical extension of the PC as
demonstrated by the way that it gives the individual user the freedom to
perform private activities in public. Thus, the laptop may turn any public
or commercial space into a private workplace or play space. Since people
can take their work and their games with them wherever they go, the
whole traditional opposition between workspace and private space breaks
down. For example, when one goes to a café, one sees people working
with their laptops as if these customers are sitting at home: they have their
food, their phone, their newspaper, and other personal items displayed in
public. The reverse of the public being absorbed into the private is
therefore the private being displayed in public.31
Of course both the privatization of the public and the publicizing of the
private are fueled by the twin engines of autonomy and automation. In this
context, subjective freedom is tied to the mechanical reproduction of a set
system of technological functions. For instance, one of the central uses for
the PC is the employment of various word and image processing
programs. These technologies center on the preprogramming of
“universal” templates and systems of scientific order; thus, programs like
spell-checker function by automating tasks that individuals traditionally
controlled. However, instead of seeing this transfer of responsibility from
the individual writer to the machine, most people that I have interviewed
feel that this automation gives them more autonomy to concentrate on
what really matters. Moreover, as we saw in my initial example of
Benjamin exchanging texts with his friends, the automation of the copy
and paste functions increases the freedom of the individual writer to move
text around and to engage in acts of constant revision. Automation
therefore adds to textual fluidity, which in turn, feeds a sense of personal
autonomy.
Powering the PC revolution of automodernity are the Internet and the
World Wide Web. At first glance, these technological systems appear to
represent the epitome of the postmodern stress on multiculturalism, social

31
Behind this discussion of the privatization of the public realm through
technology is an acknowledgement of the political movement to undermine the
public realm and the welfare state.
 Bob Samuels 79

interaction, and the movement away from the individuated modern self;
however, we can read these technologies as actually undermining the
social and the multicultural worlds by giving the individual consumer of
information the illusion of automated autonomy. In many ways, the
people’s experience of the Web challenges the postmodern idea that we
are constrained by time and space and that our relationships with others
are defined by our cultural and social differences and relations. From the
perspective of people, all information from any culture and any person is
immediately available to any user at any time and from any place. Thus in
cyberspace, temporal and spatial restraints do not seem to matter.
In fact, by reviewing several of the Global Kids essay winners, we find
a reoccurring theme concerning this loss of spatial and temporal
differences and a growing sense that cultural differences no longer pose a
barrier to understanding. For example in an essay entitled “From
Gutenberg to Gateway,” Mike H. writes,

“My generation is more understanding of other cultures, simply because

we are better informed than our parents were. We play games that prepare
us for the world by heightening our awareness and teaching us to solve
problems.”32

According to this writer, new media people are not only more informed
about cultural differences than previous generations, but new communication
and gaming technologies are training youth for a globalized world.
Another essay (“Digital Media in My Life”), reiterates this same point
about the growing multicultural awareness of globalized people; however,
in this writing, inter-cultural understanding is founded on a denial of
differences,

“Since there is no way to tell who people are when they're online, people
have to be accepted for who they are. We learn to think about what a
person says often times without knowing who said it, thus eliminating any
possible bias”33

This statement reflects on the fundamental conflict of modern

universalism: on one level, universality promotes equal rights and a
rejection of prejudices, but on another level, universality can indicate a

32
H., Gutenberg.
33
Kyle M., “Digital Media in My Life,” Grand Prize Essay submitted in 2006
Global Kids Digital Media Essay Contest, http://olpglobalkids.org/content/dmec-
grand-prize-essay-untitled-essay-kyle-m.
80 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

lack of sensitivity regarding cultural and ethnic differences. Thus, if we

are all treated equally, then none of our differences count.
In automodernity, the conflicted nature of modern universals is often
repressed below a hyper-modern sense of globalized access and information
exchange. Furthermore, as the following quote from the same essay
implies, modern and automodern universality is haunted by the conflicted
double legacy of individualism and social conformity:

“Self-reliance and assertiveness are other important qualities gained from

the Net. There are web sites for all sorts of purposes, from fantasy football
to free speech. Internet-based self-reliance comes from the independent
nature of the computer because it is designed for use by one person. When
on the Internet, people decide where to go and what to do entirely on their
own, and that idea has been firmly engrained in the minds of this new
generation. These thinking characteristics acquired through frequent use of
the Internet can be valuable in society, whether taking a stand for a belief,
accepting a person's opinion, or setting a goal, are all positive attributes of
the way we think, which makes me optimistic about the new generation.”34

This person rightly proclaims the power of autonomy on the personal

computer, and I do not think that we should posit that he is simply being
duped by a lure of false individualism. However, what we do need to
examine are the possible consequences of this universal model of
libertarian self-reliance.
One important issue that this same essay brings up is the common
connection between individual autonomy and consumerism:

“The way kids are going to function in the world is amazing, particularly
as consumers. The Internet provides nearly unlimited options and choices.
The vast ‘information superhighway’ gives so many options that it will
become necessary to offer customization for every product.”35

This statement does seem to reflect the notion that while the Internet
can increase our sense of individual control, it also can function to steer
our autonomy into spaces that are controlled by economic interests.
Furthermore, this version of autonomy appears to be predicated on the
marketing rhetoric of free choice in a frictionless economy, and what we
often see in this type of belief is a libertarian equation of free markets, free
speech, and personal freedoms.
It is important to examine how this new media mode of libertarian

34
M., Digital Media.
35
Ibid.
 Bob Samuels 81

autonomy often calls for a privatization of the public sphere and a use of
automation in the pursuit of personal liberty and controlled social
interaction. For instance, in the following statement from this essay, the
young writer combines together a celebration of the social aspects of
multiple-user video games with a denial of cultural and ethnic differences:

“Online multi-player video games are, contrary to common belief, very

social atmospheres where players get to know one another personally.
Gamers often group together in clans or guilds to play alongside each other
on a regular basis. I've spoken to forty-year-olds with wives and children
who still cut out a half-hour each day to play a World War II-based
shooting game. One of the greatest aspects of these groups is that no one
sees what the other people look like, but they respect each other
nonetheless. These guys could have completely different backgrounds,
different ethnicities, and totally different religions, but all of these
variables dissolve when you are shooting virtual enemies as a team. Clans
and guilds are microcosms of the business world in that people must learn
to work together to achieve goals systematically.”36

In reading this passage, I believe that is necessary to not fall into a

simple pro vs. con conception of video games and virtual violence; rather,
I want to stress that this new model of social interactivity transforms the
public realm into a shared space populated by highly autonomous
users/consumers. Instead of the public realm being a place of ethnic and
cultural conflict and difference, the privatized public realm becomes a
space to ignore differences and to focus on commonalities: once gain this
is both a positive and negative universalizing gesture.
On one level, we are seeing a growing tolerance of cultural differences,
and on another level, these differences are simply being denied. Moreover,
as these essays reveal, this repression of cultural differences is linked to
the veiling of temporal and spatial differences. From a critical perspective,
we may want to affirm that without the limits of time and space, many
modes of otherness begin to disappear and fade beneath a veil of global
access. Therefore, while the Web may enable people to encounter multiple
cultures and various social relationships, they often experience those
interactions through the window and frame of their PC, and in this
technological context, all encounters with others become visually boxed
into the confines of the screen: Here, the frame of the screen serves as a

36
Chris F., “Digital Media through the Monitor of a H4x0r,” Winning Essay
submitted in 2006 Global Kids Digital Media Essay Contest,
http://olpglobalkids.org/content/dmec-winning-essay-digital-media-through-
monitor-h4x0r.
82 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

mental container for Otherness.37 Like a cage at a zoo or a picture frame at

a museum, the structure of the framed screen provides a strong sense of
limits and borders. Moreover, it is important to stress that it is the
individual who decides what to put up on the screen, and this sense of
individual control reinforces the feeling of autonomy for the PC user.
Another location of automated autonomy on the Internet are search
engines that allow individuals to perform quickly and easily complicated
tasks of locating, sorting, and accessing diverse information. Through
automation, search engines, like google.com, render invisible the multiple
methods and technologies employed to scan the globalized Web for
personal reasons. Furthermore, instead of relying on experts or modern
sorting systems, like library card catalogues, automated search engines
appear to put the power of cultural filtering into the hands of the
autonomous user. Of course, these technological systems have their own
inner logic and preprogrammed priorities, but these systemic issues are
most often hidden from view.
In fact, one could argue that PCs and the Web work together to hide
social and technological determination behind the appearance of
autonomous user control. For example, many blogging programs offer
highly controlled and limited templates, but these technological
restrictions are buried beneath the power of the individual to create his or
her own media. Therefore, even though most Myspace sites look the same
and have similar content, people often feel that these automated templates
provide for a great deal of personal freedom, self-expression, and personal
identity. Furthermore, as in the case of other social networking technologies,
personal blogs are a great example of the breakdown between the
traditional division between the private and public realms, for blogs give
every individual user the possibility of distributing private thoughts in a
public space. Like personal homepages, these Internet sites trace the
movement of media control from large social organizations to the
fingertips of individual users and producers. Thus, one of the most
exciting aspects of these new media modes of information distribution is
that instead of people having to rely on large, corporate media outlets for
their news and information, private individuals can become their own
public media reporters. In fact, this absorption of the public media into the
private realm has also resulted in the use of these private blogging sources
in traditional journalistic media. Furthermore, in an unexpected twist,
broadcast journalists are now searching blogs for news and personal

37
I am drawing here from Heidegger’s work on the enframing power of
technology; Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977).
 Bob Samuels 83

reporting.
While some may say that the use of blogs exemplifies the postmodern
emphasis on the social foundations of knowledge production and
exchange, I would argue that the PC world of personalized culture absorbs
the social construction of information into the autonomous echo chambers
of individuated media. In other words, when every user also becomes a
producer of media, the multiplication and diversification of potential
sources for information increases to such an extent that individual
consumers are motivated to seek out only the sources and blogs that
reinforce their own personal views and ideologies. Here, the screen truly
becomes an automated mirror of self-reflection.
One way to summarize the effects of many of these automodern
technologies that I have related to the PC is to look at the iPod. On one
level, the iPod is the perfect example of the use of automation to give
individuals the autonomy to select and filter information and to absorb a
previously public domain into the control of the private individual. We
often forget that at one time, music was heard mainly in public settings;
however, with the advent of recording technologies, music was freed from
its live expression and was allowed to enter into the homes of individuals
through shared distribution systems. It is also important to point out that
the radio, like the television, is still a public medium, which is most often
absorbed into private homes and now automobiles. Yet, on the radio, the
selection of songs belongs to someone else, and therefore it caters to a
more public and shared reception of music. Likewise, albums combined
songs in a particular order that pre-packages a predetermined collection of
music. However, with the iPod, these public and industry-related restraints
are eliminated, and the user is free through automation to create his or her
own selection of songs.
Most importantly, the iPod allows people to take music anywhere and
to use headphones as a way of cutting off the social world around them.
For example, I often see students in public spaces listening to their iPods
and moving and singing to the music as if they were alone in their private
bedrooms. Here, we re-find the loss of the distinction between the private
and the public realms. Also, the fact that so many people take their songs
from illegal peer-to-peer Internet sites shows how the loss of the public
realm is coupled with an undermining of certain commercial interests. In a
way, individual users are privatizing the music industry by illegally
downloading music and creating their own systems of distribution and
consumption. Yet, the success of Apple and iTunes point to the ways that
anti-corporate mentality of some peer-to-peer file-sharers has been quickly
absorbed back into a corporate and consumerist structure. The libertarian
84 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

impulses of the autonomous new media user are thus quite compatible
with the production of a new consumer economy. In fact, in many of my
students’ essays about their uses of new media, they often equate
individual freedom with the free market. Of course, what is usually left out
of this equation is the idea of a public realm of protected and enacted
citizenship.

Automodern Convergences
Many people feel that the next stage of technology development will
be the combination of the iPod, the PC, the Internet, and the cell phone. In
this synergistic approach to automodern technology, we see the desire for
total mobility and individual autonomy through the use of highly
automated systems. One fear is that once all of these new media and
technologies are absorbed into the cell phone, individuals will lose all
ability to differentiate how to act in public from how to act in private.
Already, cell phones make it easy for people to have private conversations
in public, and this ignoring of the public often results in a situation where
people in a public setting are all having their own private interactions with
people who are not in the same physical space.
Another danger is that cell phones tend to make people forget where
they actually are physically. For instance, it has been shown that when
people drive cars and talk on the cell phone at the same time, they are
more prone to accidents because they literally forget that they are
driving.38 Like so many other automodern technologies, cell phones allow
people to enter into a technological flow where the difference between the
individual and the machine breaks down. In other terms, due to the fluid
and immersive nature of these technologies, people forget that they are
using them, and in many ways, they become one with their machines.
With the immersive fluidity of cell phones, people often claim that
they are addicted to the use of this technology and that they suffer from
withdrawals when they are forced to not use these machines. In fact, I
often see my students approach my classes while talking on the phone, and
then when class ends, they immediately, compulsively get back on the cell.
Sometimes, I overhear the conversations these students have between
classes, and these communications seem to have no other content than
“checking in” or stating the students’ present location. It is as if they do
not feel that they exist unless someone else hears about their current

38
In fact, some studies equate the effect of using a cell phone while driving to
driving under the influence of alcohol.
 Bob Samuels 85

presence. Here, autonomy is shown to be dependent on the recognition of

others. Furthermore, it is interesting that students often detail the location
and the time of their calls as if to show that time and space are still
relevant. Thus, as new automodern technologies break with past
conceptions of time and space, they also call for a continuous unconscious
return to temporal and spatial coordinates.39
This need for people to have their autonomy registered by others can
also be seen in blogs, web cams, and online diaries. All of these new
technologies point to desire for people to be heard and seen by people they
may not even know. Like public confessional booths, these automodern
processes allow for an externalization of interior feelings and ideas.
However, unlike past uses of confession by religious orders, psychologists,
and police, these types of self-disclosures do not seem to serve any higher
public purpose other than the desire for recognition. Moreover, the fact
that the audience of the confession is often absent shows how this type of
communication reduces the social other to the role of simply verifying the
individual’s presence. One could argue that the more mass society makes
us feel that we are just a number and that our voices do not count, the
more we need to simply use technology to have our autonomy registered
through automation. For example, one of the appealing aspects of popular
television shows like American Idol is that they allow for the individual
viewer to call in and register his or her own preference and presence.
Likewise, CNN news programs often read viewers’ email on air and hold
constant polls where viewers can voice their own immediate opinions. In
this new combination of autonomy and automation, we have to wonder if
this is what direct democracy really looks like, or are these uses of
personal opinions just a lure to make people feel like they have some
control over situations where they really have very little power? From an
automodern perspective, this question of whether these new modes of
participatory technology produce false or real autonomy and democracy
can be seen as irrelevant because automodern people usually do not
distinguish between real and virtual identity.
The production of false autonomy in highly automated systems can
also be understood through the example of the elevator button, which is
supposed to control the closing of the door, but in reality is not usually
attached to any real function. When elevator designers were asked why
they include this non-functioning button, they responded that many people
feel out of control and anxious in elevators, and so this button gives them a

39
I stress the unconscious nature of the retention of spatial and temporal concerns
because students claim that they are not aware that they often have conversations
about their locations in space and time.
86 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

sense of control and eases their worries. According to Slavoj Zizek,

“It is a well-known fact that the close-the-door button in most elevators is a

totally dysfunctional placebo which is placed there just to give individuals
the impression that they are somehow participating, contributing to the
speed of the elevator journey. When we push this button the door closes in
exactly the same time as when we just press the floor button without
speeding up the process by pressing also the close-the-door button. This
extreme and clear case of fake participation is, I claim, an appropriate
metaphor [for] the participation of individuals in our post-modern political
process.”40

For Zizek, automation often allows for a high level of false autonomy
and therefore represents a fake mode of social participation. Here, we re-
find the short-circuiting of the public realm by the automodern
combination of autonomy and automation. Therefore, like pushing a non-
functioning elevator button, instant television polls may only be giving
people the feeling that they are participating in direct democracy, while
their actual individual power is being diminished.
This high reliance on automation to prove autonomy is connected to an
interesting reversal of the modern opposition between the roles of active
subjects and passive objects. For example, in modern science, the scientist
is supposed to be active and mobile, while the object of study is fixed in
time and space.41 This same opposition can be seen in modern art where
the natural object stays rigid on the canvas, as the painter is free to move
around. Furthermore, modernity sees technology as a tool or object that is
controlled by the active subject. However, in automodernity, all of these
relationships are reversed. For instance, in video games, the player’s
activity is often reduced to the movement of a finger or fingers, while the
object on the screen moves around.42 Likewise, in contemporary physics,
the object of study is in constant movement or chaos, while the scientist
remains an immobile watcher. Therefore, through automation, autonomy
has been projected onto the external object, while the subject remains
passive (Zizek calls this inter-passivity).
Of course, television is really the technological object that first

40
Slavoj Zizek, “Human Rights and Its Discontents” (paper presented at the Paris-
USA Lacan Seminar, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, November 15,
1999), http://www.lacan.com/zizek-human.htm.
41
Baudrillard, Transparency, is the major source for explaining this reversal of the
subject and the object in contemporary science.
42
While it may be true that new game designers are trying to make the movements
of the player a larger part of games, this movement is still highly restricted.
 Bob Samuels 87

introduced us to this curious reversal between the subject and the object.
In fact, when the television was first reviewed at the World’s Fair by The
New York Times, the reporter wrote that this invention would fail because
no one would want to just sit in their homes and stare into a box for hours
at a time. Yet, this type of autonomous passivity is precisely what the
automodern culture is willing to do, and the fact that the television became
the first real object of the global village shows that there is almost a
universal desire for people to be inactive as they watch activity appear in
the realm of their objects.
Not only do televisions and computer games share this reversal of the
subject and object relationship, but both technologies represent a global
spread of popular culture that denies its own value and meaning. For
example, whenever I try to get students to analyze critically the shows
they watch or the computer games they play, they insist that these
activities are escapes and sources for meaningless enjoyment. From this
perspective, culture is a way of escaping society and the burden of
thinking. What then has helped this type of technology and culture to
spread around the world is that it is essentially self-consuming, and by this
term I mean it denies its own import and value.
Connected to the television and the computer game is the remote
control, whose very name points to the idea of autonomous control from
an automated distance. As Christine Rosen argues in her essay “The Age
of Egocasting,” the clicker allows for a sense of total personal freedom:

“The creation and near-universal adoption of the remote control arguably

marks the beginning of the era of the personalization of technology. The
remote control shifted power to the individual, and the technologies that
have embraced this principle in its wake—the Walkman, the Video
Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable
music devices like the iPod—have created a world where the individual’s
control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly
absolute.”43

For Rosen the ability to just turn people off or go to the next channel
represents a strong combination of automation and autonomy, which can
be seen as being highly anti-social:
By giving us the illusion of perfect control, these technologies risk
making us incapable of ever being surprised. They encourage not the
cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish. And they

43
Christine Rosen, "The Age of Egocasting," The New Atlantis, Number 7 (Fall
2004/Winter 2005), http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/7/rosen.htm.
88 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

contribute to what might be called “egocasting,” the thoroughly

personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste. In thrall
to our own little technologically constructed worlds, we are, ironically,
finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality.
From Rosen’s perspective, these new technologies not only do not
increase unexpected and innovative activities, but they work to get rid of
new and unexpected encounters. While I will discuss below different ways
that people are now challenging this thesis of ego-centrism in new media, I
often think that one reason why students seem to turn off so quickly in
class is that they are so used to having so much control over what they see
and hear. And yet, like video games, television still provides a highly
limited set of possible interactions and activities. While it is common to
point to the use of interactivity as the key driving force behind the popularity
of computer games for the automodern generation, we often find that the
type of interactivity allowed by automated games is highly restricted.
Therefore, not only does most of the activity reside on the machine’s side,
but the activities the machine can perform are all pre-scripted and form a
limited range of actions. In many ways, we are seeing a usage of new media
technologies to simultaneously erase and produce individual freedom, while
individual freedom is being equated with the free market.44
For instance, in order to allow for a high level of pre-programmed
interactivity, first-person shooter computer games must replace human
interaction with restrictive social stereotypes. However, people still enjoy
playing these games and repeating the same scenarios and choices over
and over again. While at first glance, this high level of automation and
repetition would seem to preclude a sense of personal autonomy, we must
see that individual freedom in automodernity often represents a freedom
not to do something. Thus, the freedom not to think or not to interact in a
social relationship is a highly valued freedom in this cultural order.
Likewise, the automodern celebration of free speech is in part derived
from the desire to be free from social, political, relational, and traditional
restrictions. What is then loved about computer games and contemporary
media is that they are often so politically incorrect, and therefore they
celebrate the autonomy of the individual no matter how repetitive and
reductive the media representation.

44
All of these trends feed into the neo-conservative and neo-liberal movements to
justify the cutting of taxes through the downgrading of public programs and the
deregulation of the free market. Since the public realm has been absorbed into the
automated activities of the machine, and the private realm has been equated with
the free subject of the free market, there is no longer any need to fund public
welfare projects.
 Bob Samuels 89

Future Uses of Automodern Technologies in Education

and Politics
The challenge for educators and public policy makers in the period of
automodernity is to first recognize the dominant combination of autonomy
and automation and then employ this new cultural order in a more self-
critical and social way. For example, educators can create learning spaces
where students engage in creative file-sharing activities; however, these
same students need to be given critical thinking tools to reflect on the
social and public aspects of their activities. This process will require the
development of critical technology studies as a central core to automodern
educational systems, and essential to this new form of education will be a
constant effort of forming a dialogue between “old” school and “new”
home models of media and technology. Therefore, instead of simply
ignoring how the people are using new media and technologies in
unexpected and innovative ways, it is important to first understand these
usages, to theorize and analyze their appeal, and then to find ways to
employ them in a productive social manner. Ethnographies like those
found elsewhere in this volume offer one method of exploring usage;
however, traditions in critical theory, rhetoric, and philosophy offer other
modes of thinking about the age we inhabit. And, as I’ve suggested
throughout this essay, careful attention to the subject positions crafted by
new technologies will also help us refine the theories humanities scholars
deploy when explaining the world around them. If, as scholars, our
theories help us to discern the world around us, the new relations of self to
power emerging in our networked age suggest we need more supple,
nuanced theoretical tools. Whether automodernity represents an extension
of postmodernity or a break from it, this chapter argues that we are
certainly in a moment of shifting relations of self to other that we need to
theorize and understand.
One place where new automodern technologies are being re-connected
to the public realm is in the development of social networking web sites
and software dedicated to getting people to organize online and meet
offline. For instance, meetup.com provides templates and strategies for
creating social networks that engage in particular group activities.
According to their web site, this electronic social network is involved in
combining new media technologies with more traditional social and public
activities:

“Meetup.com helps people find others who share their interest or cause,
and form lasting, influential, local community groups that regularly meet
face-to-face. We believe that the world will be a better place when
90 Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism

everyone has access to a people-powered local Meetup Group.”45

Like moveon.org, this site uses technology and media as a facilitator to

connect people online and motivate them to meet in person. In fact, I
would argue that this structure employs automodern media for postmodern
purposes, and therefore, these sites show that the privatization of the
public realm is not the only possible result of the combination of
autonomy and automation. Furthermore, these new social collective sites
may point to the future of both democratic education and politics. In
starting off with how people are already using new media technologies,
these forums for digital connection offer a new hope for a more
democratic public realm.
While I have found that most of my digitally-minded students tend to
use new media social networking sites as another mode of ego-casting
popular culture and personal communication, it is possible to help work
from students’ own interests while also moving them towards more
publicly minded online activities. For example, as an experiment in grass-
root online social involvement, teachers can have students create social
networks dedicated to a particular social intervention. In using their
viewbook or facebook personal pages, students can transform their social
networks into ad hoc, grass roots collectives directed to whatever causes
they want to pursue. One place to look at possible projects for people is
the book MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country.46 This text discusses
ways new media technologies can be used to enact a wide-variety of
public action activities, including: letter writing campaigns, product
boycotts, social petitions, election activism, voting drives, media criticism,
political house parties, and community service projects.
Another way of incorporating the unexpected activities of people is to
take advantage of the automodern fascination with viral videos. These
short digital movies can be used to collect evidence of consumer fraud and
political abuse. In fact, throughout the world, young people are using new
technologies to document human rights abuses and other social issues.
These social activities display the possible roles new media and people can
play in the global democratization and social justice movements. If we still
believe that teaching is meant to broaden our student’s horizons, challenge
them to think and behave ethically, and expose them to ideas and worlds

45
Meetup.com, “What is Meetup,”
http://help.meetup.com/customer/portal/articles/637187-what-is-meetup.
46
MoveOn.org, MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to Find Your
Political Voice and Become A Catalyst for Change (Novato, CA: New World
Library, 2004).
 Bob Samuels 91

they might not otherwise encounter, we must take seriously the ways in
which new technologies address and engage them and then use their
interests as a platform for ethical engagement with the world.
Returning to my opening example of Benjamin as a multi-media,
multi-tasking student, it is important to begin to re-imagine how our
institutions can both hold onto past effective modes of teaching and cater
to new media methods of learning and new forms of the self. The first step
in this process will be to develop a more critical and tolerant view of how
new technologies affect all aspects of people. My hope is that this chapter
will begin a conversation that steers between the extremes of naïve
celebration and pessimistic dismissal of radically ambivalent automodern
media. In developing a critical model of new media literacy, we can work
to integrate new modes of learning and living into older forms of social
interaction. Furthermore, by defending the public realm against the
constant threats of privatization, we can open up a new automodern public
space.
 METAFICTION
IN THE POST-TECHNOLOGICAL AGE:
THE CASE OF THE PEOPLE OF PAPER
AND METAMAUS

LISSI ATHANASIOU KRIKELIS

Metafiction refers to fiction that dramatizes its own construction,

offering a tautological affirmation of its artificiality. In its most ostensible
definition, metafiction is understood to “[designate] the quality of
disclosing the fictionality of a narrative.”1 It is fiction aware of its own
fictional composition; fiction that talks about itself; fiction that is
preoccupied with the epistemological and ontological concerns of its own
manufacturing. It is a form of anti-novel, a type that deflects generic
conventions—not only those pertaining to specific periods, but the very
fundamental conventions that hold any novel together. Metafiction turns
the novel inside out, like a shirt that discloses its seams, thus revealing its
own constructed nature. It lays bare the fictional construction of its own
illusion,2 even though it does so by crafting yet another fictional
concoction to conceal the first.
The study of metafiction has evolved in the last fifty years, and a
corpus of scholarly material provides readers with substantial tools to
approach such texts. This article re-examines metafiction under the light of
its recent manifestations. Most metafictional novels breathe the
postmodern air and produce artifacts that reflect its thought and its
ideological norms. Metafiction and postmodern fiction are associated to
the point of convergence, but it is important to underscore that although
they may connote similar references, at times they may be completely

1
Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning, “Metanarration and Metafiction,” in
Handbook of Narratology (Narratologia 19), edited by Peter Hühn, et al. (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 204.
2
Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
(London: Methuen, 1984), 6.
 Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis 93

dissociated. It is unquestionably established that the practice of metafiction

predates postmodernism, with examples like Cervantes’ Don Quixote,3
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy,4 or Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist.5 What has
not become equally clear, however, is metafiction’s independence. Despite
its dominance in postmodernism, it does not explain everything that
postmoderism is or has produced. Metafiction should be perceived similar
to how one examines the detective novel, or the gothic novel, or even the
psychological novel. Its synchronic analysis lets it coincide with
postmodern fiction in part, but diachronically, it preexists postmodernism
and it will project itself after postmodernism’s wane.
Metafiction is not dependent upon postmodernism for its perpetuation
as a literary form. The transitional phase our culture is undergoing, in
conjunction with the question whether postmodernism is still flourishing
or has arrived at a point of saturation, are intriguing subjects that should
find interest in recent metafictional studies. Is the postmodern edifice
starting to dismantle itself, and if so what might be the consequences for
the metafictional novel? How is the metafictional novel adapting from the
postmodern mind to what is forthcoming? Does the phrase “postmodern
metafiction” adequately reflect the kind of self-reflexive literature that
postdates postmodernity? In this article I begin by examining the possible
demise of postmodernity as a cultural phenomenon, which warrants the
need for a new cultural dialogic. In the second half of the article, I turn my
attention to two contemporary metafictional novels, The People of Paper
by Salvador Plascensia6 and MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman,7 that inhabit
the post-postmodern era, and I argue that post-millennium metafiction
differs from postmodern metafiction in at least two ways: it is
technologically influenced, and it combines an astute fictionality with the
realization that fictionality can be transgressed. The technological
enhancements of the last twenty years are affecting the progress of book
making, whose printed form will soon appear antiquated, while
metafiction’s self-awareness is surpassing the fictional, requesting the

3
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote: A New Translation, Backgrounds and
Contexts Criticism, translated by Burton Raffel and edited by Diana de Armas
Wilson (New York: Norton, 1999).
4
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, edited by Howard Anderson (New York:
Norton, 1980).
5
Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, translated by David Coward (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1999).
6
Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (Orlando: Harvest, 2005).
7
Art Spiegelman, MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus, (New York:
Pantheon, 2011).
94 Metafiction in the Post-Technological Age

reader to peek through an artificial construction in order to reach a place

where the real world and the fictional are not alien to each other.

Postmodernism or Beyond?: The Need for a New Cultural

Dialogic
Studies on postmodernism, or on the self-reflexiveness of postmodern
fiction, have always been affiliated with modernism, for postmodernism is
conceived against the background of what has preceded it, as both a
continuation and a break from the previous tradition of modernism.8 Seminal
studies on postmodernism and postmodern fiction such as Silvio Gaggi’s
Modern/Postmodern,9 Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism,10
Ihab Hassan’s “POSTmodernISM,”11 and Brian McHale’s Postmodernist
Fiction12 begin, first and foremost, by differentiating postmodernism from
modernism. The conceptualization of postmodernism is contingent upon
modernist tendencies, and any discussion of the former intuitively, and by
necessity, entails a discussion of the latter. However, could it be that at the
turn of the millennium the binary modern/postmodern should be
transposed to a different binary: postmodern/its beyond?
A number of contemporary critics agree that postmodernism is no
longer a fitting word to express today’s cultural milieu. If postmodernism
is seen as in the process of dying, the more urgent and pertinent question
would be to examine it, not against what anticipated it, but against what is
expected to emerge, against what is in fact already emerging. “Now that
generic technologies, liberal globalization and human rights are
triumphing, the label ‘postmodern’ is starting to look old; it has exhausted
its capacities to express the world now coming into being... That era is
now ended.”13 Similarly, and as early as 1993, Raymond Federman
predicates the end of postmodernism with a lyrical image:

8
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New
York: Routledge, 1988), 49-50.
9
Silvio Gaggi, Modern/Postmodern: A Study in Twentieth-Century Arts and Ideas
(Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989).
10
See note 8 ex supra.
11
Ihab Hassan, “POSTmoderniISM,” New Literary History 3, no. 1 (1971): 5–30,
accessed October 13, 2009, JSTOR, Web.
12
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987).
13
Gilles Lipovesky, Hypermodern Times, translated by Andrew Brown
(Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 30.
 Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis 95

“[Postmodernism] simply came and went like a flock of migratory birds,

and we followed its flight across the sky, and watched it disappear over the
horizon. Out of a strange necessity, but above all because it carried in itself
its own demise ... Postmodernism had to either die or go elsewhere and
become something else, which is what it did, even though it continues to be
called by the same name.”14

Federman views postmodernism as a phenomenon that came and went,

without being pushed out by a successor that displaced it; whatever
postmodernism might have brought with it in its short stay has dissipated
without leaving a trail. It is a rather idealized image of postmodernism—
since its death is not attributed to any failures—a statement that, coming
from a postmodern novelist, is well justified. Federman’s last phrase
insinuates that although the term persists despite the eclipse of its practice,
it does not cover the same intellectual activities that postmodernism
originally meant to demonstrate. Nonetheless, he refrains from exploring
what these other practices might entail or what they may reveal. What do
the present and immediate future hold once postmodernism is made
obsolete and what are the risks our generation takes in retaining the same
term whose basic morphology no longer corresponds to its old
manifestations?
Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern helped standardize the
beginning of postmodernism in the 1960s, and the present article will
abide by this date as an artificial indicator of its establishment. Some
critics situate the dawn of the modern period in the Enlightenment and
argue that we dwell in the same tradition, with enlightenment, modernism,
postmodernism, and everything in between as evolving phases of the same
intellectual thought (Habermas,15 Harvey,16 Jameson17), and with the
inevitable successor of postmodernism still being encompassed in this vast
conception of modernity.18 Raoul Eshelman19 along with Neil Brooks and

14
Raymond Federman, “Before Postmodernism and After (Part One),” in The End
of Postmodernism: New Directions, (Stuttgart: M&P Verlag fur Wissenschaft und
Forschung, 1993), 52, original ellipses.
15
Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” in A Postmodern Reader,
edited by Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, (Albany: State U of New York P,
1993), 91-105.
16
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
17
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(London: Verso, 1991).
18
Alan Kirby, Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern
and Reconfigure Our Culture (New York: Continuum, 2009), 2, and Peter V.
96 Metafiction in the Post-Technological Age

Josh Toth20 speculate that the end of postmodernism occurred in between

two falls: the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, which symbolizes the
ideological fall of communism, and 9/11, the fall of the Twin Towers,
which is the onset of a new era haunted by the fear of terrorism.
Somewhere between 1989 and 2001, postmodernism died—or it began its
slow and strenuous denouement, whose end is marked by a continual
mourning:

“this emerging epoch seems to ‘mourn’ the apparent loss of the very
idealistic alternatives that postmodern strove to efface. Moreover, and if
we recall Derrida’s own take on mourning, this period can be defined by its
desire to get over—or, rather, to finally lay to rest—that which came
before.”21

In this definition of the after, Brooks and Toth name the oxymoron that
postmodernism persists by resisting itself; it is both a ghost of the past and
a new affirmation, for at the moment we are experiencing its exodus. But
if postmodernism is on its way out, leaving still a trail of its presence, its
nascent successor has surely not taken a decisive form, and while it is
imperative to acknowledge that there might be a separation, there is also a
continuation of the old. Certain constitutive postmodern traits are
maintained, while they are pairing up with new practices, some that
dismantle the traditional edifice of postmodernism and others that
transcend from it completely. We may repeat what Habermas once wrote
about modernism: “[It] is dominant but dead.”22
There are many ways to examine the future: by looking at the current
trends in culture and in the arts (Eshelman,23 Kirby,24 Rowe25); in the
sociopolitical formations that affect the way culture is molded (Brooks and

Zima, “Why the Postmodern Age will Last,” in Beyond Postmodernism:

Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture, edited by Klaus Stierstorfer
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 14-5.
19
Raoul Eshelman, Performatism, Or, the End of Postmodernism (Colorado:
Davies Group, 2009).
20
Neil Brooks and Josh Toth, “Introduction: A Wake and Renewed?,” in The
Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism (Postmodern Studies 40),
edited by Neil Brooks and Josh Toth (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 1-13.
21
Brooks and Toth, Introduction, 3.
22
Habermas, Modernity, 95.
23
See note 19 ex supra.
24
See note 18 ex supra.
25
John Carlos Rowe, “Nineteenth-Century United States Literary Culture and
Transnationality,” PMLA 118, no. 1 (2003): 78–89.
 Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis 97

Toth,26 Charles,27 Lipovesky28); in the trajectory of the future of literary

criticism and continental philosophy (Bryant et al.,29 Fludernik,30 Klein31);
or in all of these areas collectively. In a homologous way, one may fathom
the future with respect to the past by criticizing postmodern practices,
highlighting their failures and reiterating their paradoxical and contradictory
axioms (what most of the articles in Theory’s Empire32 attempt to
accomplish), proposing something else in postmodernism’s place (what
Critical Realism tried to achieve as early as the nineties33). Postmodernism,
as continental philosophy, (along with phenomenology, structuralism,
post-structuralism, and deconstruction) is accused of mediating reality and
culture through human thought and textuality, but this “linguistic turn” is
yearning toward a “speculative turn,” that is a return toward an
examination of reality itself independent of thought and humanity.34
Additionally, postmodern textuality is condemned for an overemphasis on
plot-line, inadequacy in producing insightful and revelatory narratives, and
promoting a vacant spirituality.35
A recent example of an attempt to dislodge the postmodern comes
from Raoul Eshelman who proposes the term “performatism” in
Performatism, or, the End of Postmodernism as the new cultural paradigm.
According to Eshelman, performatism—a trend in popular culture found in
films, literature, plastic arts, even in architecture—is a return to monist
aesthetics endowed with “a distinctly theist cast.”36 The uncertainty of

26
See note 20 ex supra.
27
Sebastien Charles, “Paradoxical Individualism: An Introduction to the Thought
of Gilles Lipovetsky,” introduction to Hypermodern Times, by Gilles Lipovetsky
and translated by Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 1-28.
28
See note 13 ex supra.
29
Levi R., Bryant, et al., “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” Introduction to The
Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi R. Bryant,
et al. (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), accessed October 4, 2012, http://www.re-
press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf, 1-18.
30
Monika Fludernik, “Narratology in the Twenty-First Century: The Cognitive
Approach to Narrative,” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010): 924–30.
31
Richard Klein, “The Future of Literary Criticism,” PMLA 125, no. 4 (2010):
920–23.
32
Daphne Patai and Corral H. Wilfrido, eds., Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of
Dissent (New York: Columbia UP, 2005).
33
José López and Garry Potter, eds., After Postmodernism: An Introduction to
Critical Realism (London: Athlone, 2001).
34
Bryant, et al., Speculative, 3.
35
Kirby, Digimodernism, 23, 25.
36
Eshelman, Performatism, 13.
98 Metafiction in the Post-Technological Age

postmodern aesthetics, with their infinite regress and immanent

undecidability, are turned into a new aesthetics where dogmatic guidelines
lead the spectator to narrative closure while enforcing a “reader
identification with the subject” of the aesthetic product.37 Not only do
these transformations indicate a resistance to postmodern tendencies, but
also a conscious endeavor to escape it. Performatist works embody a
“metaphysical optimism” that postmodernism never favored (8). As
Nicoline Timmer points outs: “it is not unthinkable that after endless
proposals for deconstructions, a desire to construct will break through,”
and Eshelman’s treatise manifests this yearning.38 Despite Eshelman’s
having found a distinctive property that distinguishes postmodernism and
performatism, however, his theoretical framework is applicable to a
handful of works, and only time will tell if they are representative of the
new epoch. As of now, Eshelman’s position is yet another conspicuous
endeavor to renounce the postmodern and propose something else in its
place, another demonstration of the imperative need for a new dialogic.
From a culturally different position, fundamentalism contests the
persistence of postmodernism and challenges whether the growing spread
of the former indexes the demise of the latter. An informative article by
Paul Maltby, “Postmodernism in a Fundamentalist Arena,”39 problematizes
the poles of postmodern nihilism instilling the doubt whether the two
trends can be subsumed under the same label. These concerns are in direct
confrontation with questions of generative theoretical discourse; in other
words, how is theory produced? Does it reflect the culture it attempts to
describe and examine, or does it fabricate it? Is postmodernism a label that
explains culture, or does the cluster of postmodern clichés frame cultural
thought today? Although postmodernism was initially affiliated with pop
culture remonstrating against the elitism of high modernism, it is now
accused of being highly elitist and inaccessible, grounded in theoretical
abstractness, mainly entertained by the academia, and therefore removed
from the masses. Implicit in Maltby’s article is the need to reconcile the
two opposing trends of thought (fundamentalism/postmodernism), and
observe whether the growing number of fundamentalists in the U.S. might
be an indicator of postmodernism’s dissolution, and a return to a more

37
Ibid., 39.
38
Nicoline Timmer, Do You Feel It Too? The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in
American Fiction at the Turn of the Millennium (Postmodern Studies 44)
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012), 21.
39
Paul Maltby, “Postmodernism in a Fundamentalist Arena,” in The Mourning
After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism (Postmodern Studies 40), edited by
Neil Brooks and Josh Toth (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 15-52.
 Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis 99

conservative mentality, that repudiates postmodern skepticism and yields

to traditional coercive powers.
In a further attempt to separate contemporary man from his
postmodern ancestor, Sebastien Charles defines the contemporary post-
postmodern subject in terms that perpetuate contradictoriness and
incongruity. For Charles, the hypermodern subject is on the precipice of a
schizophrenic tantrum, for is characterized by a set of contradictory
paradoxes that prolong and amplify the postmodern predicament. He is a
Narcissus unaware of his immaturity, and irresponsibility, who nonetheless

“presents himself mature, responsible, organized, efficient, and flexible. ...

Hypermodern individuals are both better informed and more destructed,
more adult and more unstable, less ideological and more in thrall to
changing fashions, more open and more easy to influence, more critical
and more superficial, more skeptical and less profound.”40

This ambivalence is partly dependent upon the fact that there is no

theoretical or spiritual discourse to reassure and guide the hypermodern
subject, since postmodernism with its defiance towards eternal truth has
supplanted the old—and to a certain extent admittedly flawed—cultural
signposts. In the prominent postmodern figures of Derrida, Lacan,
Althusser, Lyotard, the only certainty is that certainties do not exist, that
specifiable ends are indeterminate, that totalized meaning is infeasible.
Postmodernism has been assiduously criticized for these proclamations,
often accused of “dogmatic relativism,”41 on the one hand repudiating
single truths in favor of multiplicity and diversity, while on the other hand
decreeing the existence of a single truth on the matter of truths: that of
being many. Resistance to this ideological sediment characterizes the
period that comes after postmodernism, which seems to contest the
postmodern that privileges “individualism and solipsism over the illusion
of communal bonds, religious faith, ethical claims.”42
Finally the advent of the Internet and the post-technological
advancements of the new millennium no longer adequately fit the
postmodern label. Linda Hutcheon emblematizes the quintessence of
postmodern culture in the medium of television,43 as it is also foreshowed

40
Charles, Paradoxical, 11-2.
41
Gregory Marshall, “Fictions, Facts, and the Fact(s) of(in) Fictions,” MLS 28, no.
3/4 (1998), accessed April 12, 2011, JSTOR, Web, 15.
42
Brooks and Toth, Introduction, 6.
43
Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 10.
100 Metafiction in the Post-Technological Age

by Baudrilliard44 in his hyperreality. If television epitomizes the

postmodern, the Internet should be the hallmark of the after, which is
coincidentally located between the two falls: the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the fall of the Twin Towers. The Internet’s inception in 1991
revolutionized those developed industrial countries that experienced its
impact. Globalization, transnationalism, cross-culturalization, even
consumerism and “commercialization of lifestyles”45 are being narrativized
in a nebulous space in which pieces of knowledge may be accessed: ethnic
histories of the dominant or the unspoken, personal diaries, private videos,
unpublished works of art, previously inaccessible documents, pictures,
paintings. The media, which used to control the distribution of
information—or misinformation—have been overcast by domineering
websites in the age of the Internet: Youtube, Facebook, Twitter. The
narratives of our modern contemporary culture, in the post-industrial and
post-technological world, stem from unprecedented interactions between
humans, the medium of language—which postmodernism assures is a
flawed medium—alongside the medium of technology. Technology, and
especially the Internet, is a prominent and stand-out medium, circulating
information ubiquitously and instantaneously, compressing the
conventionality of the spatiotemporal, and producing a flooding of
information that leaves one more informed and less knowledgeable at the
same time.
But the Internet diverts from the postmodern as well as it prolongs it.
More than ever before, “the present is experienced as if it were always
already narrated in retrospect.”46 Although Mark Currie’s remarks are not
made with Facebook and Tweeter in mind (he is writing in 1998), they
most aptly prefigure today’s Internet age. Acts of reporting install and
secure what has happened as infallible fact, demonstrating that “we do not
really believe something to be real until it is achieved as narration.”47 Our
lives happen the moment we publicize private experiences, the moment we
assure there is an audience watching over us, analogous to the way we
watch over celebrities on reality T.V. and read about their lives in gossip
magazines. Our lives happen because we report them, because we open up
our private rooms without really opening our doors.
Different avenues, therefore, herald the need for a new dialogic; one
that is neither synonymous with, nor a categorical break from, the tradition

44
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser
(Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994).
45
Lipovesky, Hypermodern, 31.
46
Mark Currie, Postmodern Narrative Theory (New York: Palgrave, 1998), 97.
47
Ibid., 100.
 Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis 101

of postmodernism, but begins to emerge as the new cultural paradigm of

modern times. Critical realism, renewalism, hypermodernism, performatism,
and digimodernism, are some of the neologisms employed to name
postmodernism’s successor, but none has prevailed thus far. What is more,
their approaches, their examples, and their renderings yield vastly different
interpretations, which hardly form a consensus; however, paradoxically,
they all foresee a return to “new” forms of realism, whether in the arts or
in philosophy, a retrieval from the subjective and the individualistic to a
more open speculation about the nature of reality. Only time will tell if
these attempts to theorize the present will simply be reappropriated back to
the same label “postmodernism” as variations or its evolving chapters.

Post-Millennium Metafiction
When it comes to addressing the textuality and the narrative forms that
the post-postmodern era seems to be surfacing, the Internet, digitalization,
computerization, and computationalization hold a pivotal position. In his
theoretical disquisition on Digimodernism, Alan Kirby maintains that even
if we assume everything has remained unchanging since the dawn of
postmodernism, certainly one thing has changed:

“[No] matter how inventively you interpreted Gravity’s Rainbow you

didn’t materially bring it into existence, and in this Pynchon’s postmodern
exemplum exactly resembled Pride and Prejudice. [By contrast,] the
digimodernist text in its pure form is made up to a varying degree by the
reader or viewer or textual consumer... [S/he] makes texts where none
existed before.”48

Digimodernism, according to Kirby, expresses a rupture that is impelled

by technological innovation, and permits divergence from the classical
modes of textuality. Moreover, it yields forms that allow for the kind of
interaction between audience and medium that were inconceivable in the
recent past.49
Although Kirby treats textuality openly, encompassing a variety of its
manifestations in animation films, in web interfacings such as chat rooms
and blogs, and in interactive programs on T.V. like Big Brother, Katherine
Hayles’s study on electronic literature, Electronic Literature: New
Horizons for the Literary, employs the same springboards of digitalization
and computationalization to discuss only the advent of literature and how

48
Kirby, Digimodernism, 51.
49
Ibid., 50.
102 Metafiction in the Post-Technological Age

it is impacted by these extraneous forces. A compelling argument that

Hayles makes is that post-millennium print literature is highly influenced
by the games and gimmicks in which electronic literature has the power
and potentiality to engage.50 Because of the freedom electronic literature
possesses in its performance, the print book imitates certain practices that
can be adapted for the printed page, and innovative new forms arise.
The People of Paper and MetaMaus are metafictional novels published
after the turn of the millennium, which have diverged from postmodern
metafictional literature and are therefore indicative of the new practices
post-technological literature is advancing upon. Their metafictional
engrossment marks a shift from more traditional representations in
postmodernism, while at the same time the impact of technology on their
narrative instantiates the first of the two differences that post-millennium
metafiction exemplifies. (Perhaps it is too early to refer to traditional
metafiction, and I admit using the phrase being fully aware of its
problematic assumptions; it should be acknowledged that postmodern
thought functions as a background to these texts, which can also be read
under a postmodern framework.)
While early postmodern metafictional novels toy with their typological
formation, their typesetting and typeface, producing narratives that
resemble concrete poetry—with the most notable Raymond Federman’s
Double or Nothing of 1971—post-millennium metafiction experiments
with an all-encompassing revolutionary visual effect. For metafiction, the
playfulness of the graphic surface foregrounds the artificiality of fiction,
covertly requesting the reader to imagine its book-making process, now in
its digital execution. MetaMaus is a paradigmatic illustration of the
conjuncture of metafiction and the multimodal novel. In a multimodal
novel the linguistic elements on the page share the same prominence as the
maelstrom of non-linguistic components that also flood the page and this
assemblage creates a metafictional effect. MetaMaus features a
combination of photographs, comics, drawings, pictures of book covers,
grids, and an elaborate family tree, in addition to an already rich repertoire
of linguistically opulent material, such as personal interviews, handwritten
notes, and letters. The colorful printing of the book manifests a
combination of influences, from the comic-strip tradition to the familiarity
and playfulness of the web page. In a less radical fashion, The People of
Paper is also toying with its text formation. Chapters alternate between the
normative linear structure of conventional printing and the printing of a

50
Katherine N. Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary
(Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2008), 159-61.
 Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis 103

newspaper format, where the text is printed vertically on the page in

columns each devoted to a particular character. Scattered throughout the
book are images that enhance the content of the narrative with the
implementation of the visual. A silent music score featuring no notes, a
tarot card of the devil, a food (and social) pyramid with the element of
sadness added to the bottom, are some of the non-verbal components that
are absorbed into the text’s narrative form. Words occasionally appear
crossed out, deleted, or smeared with black ink. Long sections are covered
with ink in various geometrical shapes, as characters strike out their author
and prevent him access to their consciousness. The contemporary text is
created inside a digitalized world where it must go through computerization
before it solidifies into the printed form.51 Since text, image, and sound
can all converge in the digital world, the contemporary (metafictional)
novel absorbs these influences, losing thus its monochromatic balance and
its singular association with verbality, discovering yet another level for its
flamboyant fictionality to march on.
MetaMaus is distributed with an interactive DVD, which includes the
first two volumes of Maus in digital form, along with extra material like
radio interviews and critical reviews. That MetaMaus is accompanied by a
DVD represents the coalescence of old and new forms of book making.
The DVD is a positive affirmation regarding the future of literature—
DVDs and not printed texts will circulate in the near future—and at the
same time the printed book, with all its innovative formulations, becomes
implicitly obsolete. This realization turns into a concern about the future of
printed literature in The People of Paper, which explores it as a thematic
trope. One of the characters in Plascencia’s novel is an origami figure, a
woman made out of paper, “created not from the rib of man but from
paper scraps,” when her creator, Antionio, “split the spines of books,
spilling leaves of Austen and Cervantes, sheets from Leviticus and
Judges... .”52 Merced de Papel is a multivalent symbol of printed literature.
She is the only survivor of her species, threatened by the natural elements
of rain and fire for a possible instant annihilation, which will also mean the
utter obliteration of her kind. In a passage that looks past the end of the
book and extends its gaze at its future readers, Merced de Papel is
confirmed as the symbol of the printed page, the paper with its rough
edges that the reader will be intimate with when flipping the pages of The
People of Paper:

51
Ibid., 159, 164.
52
Plascencia, People of Paper, 15.
104 Metafiction in the Post-Technological Age

“And there were those readers who, when alone, opened the book and
licked the edges of the pages, imagining that they too were going down on
Merced de Papel, their blood gathering and channeling in the furrows of
the spine. And they, these readers who were intimate with paper, went out
into the world licking their lips, showcasing their scars and sore tongues,
adding to the loves of Merced de Papel.”53

It is not coincidental that Merced de Papel is an extinct species. Her

character fears and anticipates the future of its form, which will be
superseded by the age of digitalization.
The People of Paper is a quintessentially metafictional novel and has
its origins in the Latin American literature of magic realism and in Garcia
Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude of 1967. In a whimsically comic
fashion, the novel tells the story of Mexican immigrant Frederico de la Fe
and his daughter Little Merced, who flee Mexico to Los Angeles in search
of a better life, after Frederico de la Fe’s wife, Little Merced’s mother, has
abandoned them. Their story represents the story of the Chicanos who live
in despicable conditions, being exploited and oppressed by an inescapable
tyranny. On a symbolic level, the novel is a return to the mythical stories
of rebellion against the Gods, servants against masters. Frederico de la Fe
turns the workers and gang members—who fight with roses not with
guns—against their creator, their author, their watchful eye, Saturn. Saturn
initially appears as one of the planets in Frederico de la Fe’s sky, but as the
novel unravels, he is revealed as the author of The People of Paper,
Salvador Plascencia. Convinced that his wife left him because Saturn
wanted him to depart from Mexico in order to write a story out of
Frederico de la Fe’s sorrow and sadness, Frederico de la Fe wages war
against Saturn. It is “a war for volition and against the commodification of
sadness ... against the fate that has been decided.”54
The characters employ numerous tricks to shield themselves and their
thoughts from Saturn, in an effort to sabotage his book; at times they
succeed. Technology slips through the pages, as a thematic trope, when the
characters cover their houses with the lead of mechanical tortoise. This
mechanical tortoise transmits the characters’ thoughts in a binary code, the
language of computers made with alternations of zeros (0) and ones (1).
Since Saturn does not receive thoughts in the form of human language, but
rather in binary code, he loses track of his characters and his story begins
to disintegrate.55 The first time he encounters the binary code, and being

53
Ibid., 166.
54
Ibid., 53.
55
Hayles, Electronic Literature, 171.
 Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis 105

unable to decipher it, Saturn, or Salvador Plascencia, records it

unprocessed:

Figure 1: Plascencia, The People of Paper 96–7

Copyright © 2005 used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

In the post-technological era, the boundaries between the extralinguistic

and the intralinguistic world are transgressed, and technological language
is another language of signification added to the equation. The zeros and
ones on the page do not foreground fictionality and the process of fiction-
making per se, as most metafictional novels aim in doing, but function as
indicators of the process of digital-fiction making. They are reminders of
the digital formation of the novel. In other words, they draw attention to
the fact that fictional language has resulted from the development of
computerization, and that it has been processed through the binary code
first before it is transformed once again into language to be recognized by
the human eye. If Saturn is trying to decode the computer language in
avail, the course of book making incarnates this process successfully. The
technological language is a constitutive part of its composition, being
concealed behind the legible, alphabetical language that the reader views.
106 Metafiction in the Post-Technological Age

A marked difference between the metafictional rendering of The

People of Paper and twentieth-century metafictional novels, such as
novels by John Barth (Chimera [1972], Lost in the Funhouse [1963]), or
John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Italo Calvino’s If on a
Winter Night a Traveler (1979), and Doris Lessing’s The Golden
Notebook (1962) is their engagement with embeddedness. The first wave
of metafiction places an emphasis on the complexity of layering and their
stratification into various diegetic levels. “Literature does not recognize
Reality as such, but only levels,” writes Calvino who defines literature in
terms of its distinctions of fictional reality.56 The frames of these
metafictional texts clearly separate the degree of embeddedness and allow
the reader to perceive a hierarchy between authors, characters, and
characters in novels-within-novels, thereby underscoring the degree of
fictionality displayed in each layer. In Calvino’s case, for example, a
“real/fictional” author named Calvino wrote If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveler, which is about a character-reader reading Calvino’s novel; there
is Calvino (real/fictional author), the reader (reading Calvino’s book), and
the reader in the novel-within-the-novel (character in Calvino’s book).
Traditional metafiction aspires to demarcate the borders—the borders as
boxes—that deftly separate the contained artworks from their outer sphere
and, although they blur the boundaries between what belongs to the
fictional and the non-fictional levels, they delineate an onion-like structure
with visible layers. The reader compares these world structures with each
other and with his own reality in order to “accept the textual truth” that
each one embodies.57 Metalepsis occurs as a disruptive element, an
infringement that erodes these structures by traversing them, stirring up in
the reader “a feeling of disarray, a kind of anxiety or vertigo.”58 Most
conspicuously, metalepsis is characterized by

“recognizable, logically distinct levels or possible (sub)worlds...; these

levels ... differ ontologically from each other and can be distinguished ...
by the opposition ‘fiction vs. reality.’”59

56
Italo Calvino, The Literature Machine: Essays, translated by Patrick Creagh
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1987), 120, 101.
57
Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts
(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979), 37.
58
Dorrit Cohn, “Metalepsis and Mise en Abyme,” translated by Lewis S. Gleich,
Narrative 20.1 (2012): 110.
59
Werner Woolf, “Metalepsis as a Transgeneric and Transmedial Phenonemon,” in
Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, edited by Jan
Christoph Meister, et al. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 89-90.
 Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis 107

In postmodern metafictional novels, metalepsis accentuates the degree of

fictional differences among levels, and destabilizes their set domains
without nonetheless eliding their hierarchy; in other words, elements of a
lower structure that move to a higher degree acquire the functions,
qualities, and ontological status of the given structure.
Antithetically, in The People of Paper both an affirmation and a
refutation of the embedded layers are constantly at stake, and metalepsis
losses its prominence as a literary device that disrupts these narrative
structures. While the levels of embeddedness are made clear by unfailing
markers, at the same time, they lose their significance as dividers of
fictional and non-fictional spaces, and therefore whenever metalepsis
occurs it is not an abrupt interpenetration but enforces the impression that
all embedded layers are part of a singular concordant structure in which
elements can move up and down like fish navigating at the deepest and
most shallow sea levels. In The People of Paper the paradoxical
substantiation and negation of these levels results in their overall
dismantlement. When one of the characters, Smiley, is determined to find
Saturn’s home, he is given detailed instructions how to get there. Similar
to Jack in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” Smiley climbs at a foothill, reaches
for the sky made out of papier-mâché, peels off part of it, and lifts himself
up to the world of his creator. In the physical space of the novel, Saturn’s
universe is located directly above the sky of his fictional characters. He
inhabits the skies as an omniscient and omnipotent godly presence,
observing them with his telescope and reporting their lives on paper,
giving the assumption of a “hostile, colonizing power.”60
This ostensible separation between characters and creator is quickly
liquefied. Not only does the physical space of Saturn’s universe and his
fiction resemble each other, but Saturn, Salvador Plascencia that is, is
delineated in the same fashion characters are portrayed. He appears as yet
another Chicano, who shares in the same predicaments and faces the same
sorrowful ordeals as his fictional constructions; one who, like them, is
being colonized, this time by his girlfriend’s new and white boyfriend.61
Frederico de la Fe becomes Plascencia’s fictional counterpart, whose lives
are intriguingly linked. Frederico de la Fe was abandoned by his wife
Merced who flees with her neighbor because her husband could not
control his full bladder when fast asleep. Analogously, the day Frederico

60
Kevin Cooney, “Metafictional Geographies: Los Angeles in Karen Tei
Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange and Salvador Plascencia’s People of Paper,” in On
and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture, ed. M. B. Hackler and Ari
J. Adipurwawidjana (England: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 210.
61
Ibid.
108 Metafiction in the Post-Technological Age

de la Fe wages war against Saturn, Saturn pees on his bed and Liz, his
girlfriend, abandons him for a white male.

“This is what happens, the natural physics of the world. You fuck a white
boy and my shingles loosen, the calcium in my bones depletes, my clothes
begin to unstitch. Everything weakens. I lose control. The story goes
astray. The trajectory of the novel altered because of him. They colonize
everything: the Americas, our stories, our novels, our memories.”62

Colonization is turned into a metafictional metaphor, where characters

fight their creator drawing on “postcolonial models of political resistance”
and struggling against acculturation, while their creator is giving his own
personal fight against the same cultural elements.63
This is not a case where an author writes his life into paper, but a
scenario where the fictional influences and imbalances the narrative level
that supersedes it. As Brian Richardson remarks when analyzing narratives
with “conflated” temporality, the contained narratives “move from setting
to setting, and inevitably the ‘separate’ times and spaces begin to melt or
bleed into each other.”64 Liz admits that everything changed because
Saturn decided to fight the war instead of surrendering: “I loved you, I
loved you very much, but things changed. You went away to fight
Frederico de la Fe and then there was someone else... .”65 Frederico de la
Fe wars against tyranny and, like a ripple effect which can take on a
metaleptic quality, Saturn is inflicted with the same pain he imposed upon
his main character. Only Federico de la Fe’s pain, and that of the rest of
the Chicanos in Saturn’s novel, is a doubly intensified pain: having
abandoned their idyllic Mexican landscape, they have to face an estranged
Los Angeles, in addition to the encroaching eye of their creator. The
invasion of the characters and readers into the world of the author, a
paradigmatic example of metalepsis which would otherwise shake up the
demarcated spaces between authors and characters, has an anticlimactic
effect. Saturn is presented identical to the rest of the characters. No
stylistic differences separate them, nor do any other markers point to his
superiority as the creator. Characters and author are both presented with
the same two-dimensionality on paper; both lacking psychological depth,

62
Plascencia, People of Paper, 117.
63
Cooney, Metafictional Geographies, 210.
64
Brian Richardson, “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern
and Nonmimetic Fiction,” in Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure,
and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2002), 51.
65
Plascencia, People of Paper, 137.
 Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis 109

both remaining products of their own narratives, both affected by the

ailments of physical and psychological colonization.
The triad of narrative levels is completed with Merced de Papel, who
theoretically belongs to the diegetic level below Frederico de la Fe, since
she manifests the printed world that Frederico de la Fe’s universe
possesses; she is the fiction(s) inside fiction. She is the palimpsest of
copies inside a copy. Yet, in the fashion of magic realism, she is
materialized and remains on Frederico de la Fe’s narrative level taking the
status of characters like him. She does not invade Frederico de la Fe’s
world by way of metalepsis, but belongs to it naturally. Ultimately, all
three narrative levels coalesce, and Merced de Papel and Saturn fall into
the same metafictional realm, with no “textual truths” (to reuse Eco’s
phrase) to distance them. The underlying irony of these observations is
that the three levels of removed reality—author (presumed reality),
character (fiction), and character in fiction (fiction-within-fiction)—share
the commonalities that raise all of them beyond their metafictional
existence into a landscape of narrative equality; an equality that is taken
from them once the metafictional tricks are revealed. They undergo the
same dilemmas and face similar crises especially in matters of love.
Melancholy and sadness and how to cope with such psychological pain
is a theme that stands out in The People of Paper. Even the war is set
against the “commodification of sadness;”66 whereby sadness becomes a
marketable quality, so that products are made and sold to either combat,
soothe, or take advantage of it, with the intention of profit. From the
characters’ point of view, Saturn’s novel, The People of Paper, is one such
product, selling their grief for fourteen dollars—the actual price of the
book—with the ultimate intention of fame and profit. Liz openly accuses
Plascencia of such vanity:

“So I have moved house and replaced you with a white boy, but that is
nothing compared to what you have done, to what you have sold. In a neat
pile of paper you have offered up not only your hometown, EMF, and
Frederico de la Fe, but also me your grandparents and generations beyond
them, your partia, your friends, even Cami. You have delivered all this into
their hands, and for what? For fourteen dollars and the vanity of your name
on the book cover.”67

This is a trait that the post-technological era has bestowed to the novel as a
thematic trope, emphasizing a consumerist society, where the novel itself

66
Plascencia, People of Paper, 53.
67
Ibid., 138.
110 Metafiction in the Post-Technological Age

cannot escape its tangles, but it is being dragged along as yet another
commodity. Furthermore, sadness is woven in the novel as a leitmotif that
recurrently transgresses the narrative levels of characters. Whether
characters belong to Saturn’s level or to Frederico de la Fe’s, they cope
with psychological pain and matters of love by inflicting the body with
excruciating physical pain on their own volition: Saturn’s next girlfriend,
Cameroon cannot survive without the deliberate bee stings; Frederico de la
Fe intentionally burns his hand in the wood stove to get over the pain of
his lost wife; and the curator devises unorthodox methods to cure
characters from all sorts of melancholic tantrums.
The blurring of the three narrative layers does not reveal a fictional
world created hierarchically, but a fictional world whose various levels fall
back into the same plane, so that flatness and discursivity coexist. Unlike
the postmodern metafictional novels, which constantly remind the reader
of their artificiality in aspiring to thwart the reader’s illusion of disbelief
and promote the notion that they are stories of experimental imaginary
practices offering their own take on reality, post-millennium or post-
technological metafiction emits a different kind of proclamation: it
predicates that it is telling a fabricated story, one that is mainly constructed
by means of language, but once one passes its superficial fictionality and
digs deeply inside it, s/he acknowledges how much it resembles the real
world; how much its characters resemble real subjects; and how much
truth surfaces from a story that could not be more removed from the real
and steeped into the fictional. Nicoline Timmer in Do You Feel It Too?
The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the
Millennium proposes that in the generation of novelists who contest certain
postmodern clichés, there is a renewed interest in the portrayal of the self
as human being “no longer dismissively conceived as mere ‘paper
[being].’”68 In The People of Paper this renewed “return to the human,”
can be detected in a paradoxical context:69 characters are portrayed as
paper entities based on the title, but at the same time they have a
disposition for life and freedom that extends beyond their fictionality.
Their author resides in the same ambivalent in-between state of being
fictional and non-fictional at the same time. The People of Paper does not
aim to showcase characters as mere fictional subjects, but through their
fictionality to bring out the “human” in them.
Post-millennium metafiction reclaims what postmodern metafiction
has been mostly accused of: of an indifference to relate to its readers

68
Timmer, Feel It Too, 19.
69
Ibid., 52.
 Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis 111

beyond its own compositional formation as fictitious discourse. Metafiction

is a form that will last as long as the novel lives, for postmodernism
provided fiction with a kind of self-awareness that made it more astute and
more suspicious about its relationship to both its own use of language, and
its own use of reality. In the post-technological epoch, metafiction remains
tangential to the trajectory of the novel, but breaks free from the fear of
making claims about the historico-socio-political stratifications in society.
In the case of The People of Paper, Plascencia’s metafiction does not
impede him from taking a stand with regards to colonization, matters of
ethnicity and race, labor and exploitation, and about “local histories of
sadness.”70
MetaMaus yields the same findings as The People of Paper when it
comes to its metafictional engagement of the post-technological world,
although its route is dramatically different. Admirably metafictional,
MetaMaus is a graphic autobiography of its author and a metafictional
biography of the first two volumes of the acclaimed best-selling comic
novel Maus. In its turn, Maus is an “autographic,” that is a graphic
memoir, which also employs metafictional components in delivering the
story of Spiegelman’s Polish family: his parents, survivors of the
Holocaust, the concentration camps, and the gas chambers, finally flee to
the U.S. in order to start life anew amidst the trauma of war, the loss of
their family members, and the devastation of being foreign to a country
they were forced to make their own. The comic strips that accompany the
story of Maus depict the Jews as mice, the Nazi Germans as cats, the
Polish as pigs, and the Americans as dogs; an animalistic story about the
animalistic instincts of a society that has shed its humane appearance and
has disintegrated into beastly forms. Organized in the form of interviews,
MetaMaus explains its formation and the numerous underpinnings that
orchestrated its completion. It incorporates earlier drafts of certain pages,
drafts of sketches, while it narrates Spiegelman’s personal struggle with
writing, and what has led to the novel’s decisive form. The series of
interviews reveal what has been left out of Maus, details of Spiegelman’s
childhood, and other ontological, eschatological, and epistemological
questions about its literary choices.
Similar to The People of Paper, MetaMaus transgresses the narrative
levels that pertained to its predecessor. It might appear puzzling how
autobiographies can entertain various fictional and non-fictional levels,
since the sheer nature of an autobiography entails its absolution from

70
Ramon Saldivar, “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace
Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction,” in American Literary History 23,
no. 3 (2011), accessed August 18, 2012 (Project Muse, Web), 581.
112 Metafiction in the Post-Technological Age

fiction making. Nevertheless, Maus narrates the story of its making first,
whereas the story of the family is injected as the story-within-the-story, a
narrative recounted in the intradiegetic level. The outer sphere of the
narrative shows Spiegelman coping with the raw material his father
provided him during his interviews; in turning them into sketches and
organizing them into a sequence of narratives. Despite the fact that the
embedded story is not considered fictional, it nonetheless gives the
impression that even though it is a true story, Spiegelman is crafting it
based on the scraps from his father’s memories, reconstructing it years
after its passing. In effect, the outer narrative level of Maus is elaborated
and amplified to make up the content of MetaMaus, consisting of those
questions that readers often ask about the novel’s construction.
In MetaMaus, the transgression of the narrative embeddedness surfaces
on its unconventional introduction. This archival novel opens by tearing
up all possible illusions about fiction and fiction making, even the making
of autobiographies. Whereas in Maus everyone is depicted in animal
forms, MetaMaus opens with the aspiration to tear off the mask of the
pretender: “Maybe I could even get my damned mask off. I can’t breathe
in this any longer” admits Spiegelman in the introduction of the book,
ready to reveal his real persona by relinquishing the fictional mask he has
been wearing;71 but behind the mouse-mask, a skeleton emerges, not the
true face of Spiegelman. Only at this particular moment in the book is the
skeletal scalp portrayed. The rest of the pages feature the real image of Art
Spiegelman either in comic strips or factual photographs. On the one hand
the skeleton suspends the revelation of the authorial face, but what does
Spiegelman really intend in substituting for the face of the author a
carcass? On a symbolic level, the skeleton connotes the story of a dead and
deadly past, one that resurfaces and re-configures in the pages of Maus,
and it is further explored and penetrated in MetaMaus. Maus is a story of
“dehumanization” as Spiegelman himself calls it72 and behind the skin of
animals, only bones can be extracted. On a metafictional level, the
skeleton is a reminder that stories are not simply stories, that fictions are
not simply fictions, that even the most personal experiences can have an
endearing effect on those who vicariously live through them. Behind the
fiction of a mask a skeleton is nested, for the dead and decomposed body
represents the story of everyman. If postmodern metafiction with its self-
reflexive propensity promotes a kind of art that is preoccupied with the
fictional, an art that proclaims its fictionality intrinsic to its nature, post-

71
Spiegelman, MetaMaus, 9.
72
Ibid., 37.
 Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis 113

millennium metafiction reconciles this new postmodern tenet with more

classical renderings. Its aphorism is that behind even the most personal
stories, behind the making of a past undergoing the process of being re-
written and re-documented, one discerns the story of everyone, the story of
himself.
Postmodern metafiction emphasizes the artificiality of fiction,
cautioning readers against believing it beyond the realm of fictional
discourse; fiction’s artificiality in postmodernism remains essentially
autotelic, “a synthesis of logos and techne,” the intricate interrelation
between what is written and the style and language in which it is
delivered.73 John Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman reveals that
his story is a fabrication springing out of the intention to imitate the
writing style and structure of the Victorian novel, and that the reader may
not be duped believing in the characters’ real existence. Post-millennium
metafiction does not negate this postmodern stipulation; it simply expands
it by affirming that despite their overt fictional make-up, fictions, or
narrative constructs, can transgress their fictional landscape and inhabit a
place that profoundly resembles the reader’s. Never forget that fiction is
fictional, post-technological metafiction declares, but never forget that
fiction can transgress from its fictionality either.

73
Wladimir Krysinski, “Borges, Calvino, Eco: The Philosophies of Metafiction,”
in Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco., ed. Jorge J.E. Gracia, et al. (New
York: Routledge, 2002), 198.
 THE MOST DANGEROUS PHILOSOPHER
IN THE WEST—TO HIMSELF?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK AND THE PERILS
OF GOING PUBLIC

EVAN GOTTLIEB

Increasingly, Slavoj Žižek is everywhere. Granted, he is not yet a

household name on a par with other public intellectuals like Noam
Chomsky, Paul Krugman, or Cornell West, much less with popular pundits
like David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, or–to move even further into the
twilight realm where punditry, politics, and celebrity begin to mix
queasily–Arianna Huffington. Still, Žižek indubitably stands at the
forefront of the very small corps of contemporary intellectuals who have
managed simultaneously to maintain their academic credibility and to
have developed a public persona, following, and presence. Of course, in
the academic world, Žižek has been a veritable star ever since the
publication of his first English-language text, The Sublime Object of
Ideology in 1989. Since then, his production of books, articles, and edited
collections has accumulated so quickly that even Žižek appears to have
trouble keeping track of them all; the author biography on the slipcover of
his latest “big book,” Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of
Dialectical Materialism, reads simply “Slavoj Žižek was born, writes
books, and will die.”1 As with almost everything written by or even about
Žižek, however, there is an added layer of meaning here, for this most
basic of biographies is simultaneously an adaptation of Martin
Heidegger’s well-known suggestion that a philosopher’s life is less
important than her or his thought.2

1
Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical
Materialism (London and New York: Verso, 2012).
2
Heidegger began one of his 1924 lectures on Aristotle by asserting that a
philosopher’s biography should read simply “He was born, worked, and died.”
Quoted in Herman Philipse, Heidegger's Philosophy of Being: A Critical
 Evan Gottlieb 115

But what happens when life and philosophy become far too intertwined
to be so easily separated? In Heidegger’s case, as we know, the reception
and interpretation of his ideas have been continuously colored by the
questions surrounding his involvement with National Socialism during the
1930s and 40s–to such a degree, in fact, that it is hard not to find
something self-serving about his insistence that ad hominem arguments are
of no value when interpreting philosophical positions. There are unlikely
to be any such skeletons in Žižek’s closet; his closest brush with direct
political involvement came in 1990, when he ran as a presidential
candidate on the ticket of Slovenia’s Liberal Democratic Party.
If finishing fourth in that election put an end to the first phase of
Žižek’s public life, however, then the past few years have witnessed the
opening of a new chapter. Following the establishment of his successful
academic career in the West–he is currently Director of the Birkbeck
Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, as well as
Professor at the European Graduate School–Žižek has in recent years
begun to supplement his academic publications and lectures with a wide
variety of public pronouncements and appearances, delivered in what
nearly amounts to a full-spectrum media blitz. Even as he continues to
work primarily with the vigorously left-wing press Verso, several of his
more recent books have been published by more mainstream imprints or
series aimed at popular reading audiences.3 Furthermore, in newspapers,
magazines, and other periodicals that span high-profile institutions like the
London Review of Books and The New York Times to smaller publications
like The New Statesman and In These Times, Žižek has steadily written
columns and opinion pieces on contemporary events from the second Iraq
War to the imprisonment of members of the Russian punk band “Pussy
Riot.”4 He has been the sole subject of a pair of well-received documentaries
(Žižek! [2006; dir. Astra Taylor] and The Reality of the Virtual [2007; dir.
Ben Wright]) and the host of two more, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
(2006; dir. Sophie Fiennes) and its follow-up, The Pervert’s Guide to

Introduction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), xiii. Thanks to

Elousia Saoirse for this reference.
3
See, e.g., Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: WW Norton, 2007),
Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008);
Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjeviü, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (New
York: Seven Stories Press, 2012).
4
The website mideastdilemma.com contains a relatively thorough (and regularly
updated) online archive of Žižek’s ever-growing list of publications; see
http://mideastdilemma.com/zizek.html (accessed August 28, 2012).
116 The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West—to Himself?

Ideology (2012; dir. Fiennes).5 He has appeared on talk and radio shows
hosted by the likes of Charlie Rose and Julian Assange. Portions of these,
along with many more interviews, panel appearances, and lectures
(including in the “Authors@Google” and “RSAnimates” series), can now
be found online, where they frequently register tens of thousands of views.
Indeed, a basic Google search for “Žižek” now regularly turns up over one
million hits; small change compared to those for movie stars and athletes,
perhaps, but nevertheless surprisingly substantial for an accredited
intellectual. At the same time, Žižek is still taken seriously enough by
academia that there is a growing cottage industry of studies devoted to
introducing and interpreting him, as well as a thriving, peer-reviewed
journal devoted to studying and contextualizing his ever-growing body of
work.6
Of course, not every Žižekian intervention is unique. On the contrary,
like a modern-day Oscar Wilde, Žižek routinely borrows previous material
from himself; even in his academic texts, he is known for enthusiastically
and unapologetically recycling his characteristically polemical observations
and paradoxical-sounding insights. His propensity to redeploy the same
examples, descriptions, and jokes has itself become something of a
running joke: as far back as 2003, Geoffrey Galt Harpham can be found
complaining in the “Critical Response” pages of Critical Inquiry that he is
at a loss to respond to Žižek’s rebuttal of his article-length critique, given
that entire paragraphs of Žižek’s rejoinder are clearly lifted verbatim from
the very texts Harpham was critiquing.7 One suspects in this case that the
self-plagiarism was carried out self-consciously, as befits Žižek’s
notoriously perverse sense of humor, but it’s impossible to tell; at any rate,
Harpham was not amused.
Žižek’s penchant for repetition has not gone unnoticed by both
supporters and detractors. The latter tend to see it as a symptom of his
neurotic-obsessive need to write quickly and continually;8 the former, as a

5
Žižek also features prominently in Astra Taylor’s multi-subject documentary
featuring contemporary philosophers and theorists, Examined Life (2008).
6
See the International Journal of Žižek Studies, founded in January 2007:
http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/index
(accessed August 29, 2012).
7
Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Response to Slavoj Žižek.” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3
(Spring 2003): 504.
8
See, for example, Leigh Claire LaBerge, “The Writing Cure: Slavoj Žižek,
Analysand of Modernity,” in The Truth of Žižek, eds. Paul Bowman and Richard
Stamp (London: Continuum, 2007), 9-26. From the perspective of Žižek’s
supporters, this collection is notoriously ill-willed and misinformed; Žižek’s own
 Evan Gottlieb 117

function of his necessarily indirect and incomplete attempts to write

“around the Real element of the discourse.”9 Although I find the more
sympathetic reading of Žižek’s prolific output also to be the more
convincing, I plan to chart a somewhat different course in this essay, by
considering Žižek’s (over)production of texts as a symptom or side-effect,
neither of his psyche nor of his philosophico-political program, but rather
of his apparent ambition–or at least his eager readiness–to raise and
maintain his public profile. I want to dismiss at the outset, then, those lines
of argument that Žižek’s drive to augment his public profile is purely or
even primarily a function of narcissism or greed. Clearly, Žižek thrives on
being controversial and polemical; equally clearly, his annual earnings
already far exceed the salaries of most workaday academics. Yet if Žižek
truly wanted to sell out or cash in, as some have suggested, he could
clearly do so in ways that would require much less personal effort and
produce much more personal profit. I proceed, then, on the assumption
that Žižek sincerely wishes to boost his public profile in order to help his
critical project reach a greater audience–in order, that is, to further what
Žižek himself calls the “hard work on our own ideological underground”
that in turn will facilitate “emancipatory struggle.”10
The epithet I have recycled in my title–“the most dangerous
philosopher in the West”–is associated with a notorious review by Adam
Kirsch in The New Republic attacking several of Žižek’s monographs.11 To
my mind, it exemplifies an unfortunate trend in this latest phase of Žižek’s
already storied career: his views and methods, as they have begun to reach
a larger, non-academic audience, are being systematically and seriously

“Afterword” to the volume is entitled, tellingly, “With Defenders Like These, Who
Needs Attackers?” (197-255).
9
Chris McMillan, Žižek and Communist Strategy: On the Disavowed Foundations
of Global Capitalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 8.
10
Slavoj Žižek, “Tolerance as an Ideological Category.” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 3
(Summer 2008): 682.
11
I say “associated with,” not “quoted from,” because Kirsch later claimed that the
phrase is a misprision of the initial “cover line” for his review: “the most
despicable philosopher in the West”; see Kirsch, “Žižek [sic] Strikes Again,” The
New Republic, July 26, 2010, http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/
76531/slavoj-zizek-philosophy-gandhi (accessed Sept. 3, 2012). “Dangerous,”
however, is precisely the adjective Kirsch himself used in the title of his earlier
riposte to Žižek’s published rebuttal of the initial review. See Adam Kirsch,
“Disputations: Still the Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West – A Reply to
Slavoj Žižek,” The New Republic, January 7 2009,
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/disputations-still-the-most-dangerous-
philosopher-the-west (accessed Sept. 3 2012).
118 The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West—to Himself?

misunderstood. Of course, as anyone who has picked up one of his most

recent books knows, Žižek (or at least his editors) has craftily taken
Kirsch’s attempt at a term of opprobrium and used it as book-jacket
puffery. Yet especially at a time when the mainstream media seems more
than usually prone to reactionary anti-intellectualism, Žižek’s public
presentation of both himself and his critical positions repeatedly run the
risk of alienating the very public he seems more desirous than ever of
reaching. In what follows, I will return to Kirsch’s review, as well as turn
to other recent responses, both popular and academic, to the Slovenian
philosopher. Rather than attempt a comprehensive reception study of
Žižek’s growing public stature, however, I want primarily to consider
some of the apparent strategies he has adopted for achieving his nearly
unprecedented degree of popularity, with some consideration of the
drawbacks and limitations of those strategies and his media presence.
Once those tasks have been (provisionally) completed, I will turn to
consider whether, in an age that finds itself “after postmodernism,” the
Žižekian public intellectual is ultimately, even inherently a contradiction
in terms.

****
At first glance, Žižek’s growing public profile seems an unlikely
supplement to his already thriving (if still controversial) academic
stardom. He is, after all, saddled with a foreign name, thick accent, and
unkempt appearance.12 Furthermore, the monographs and scholarly essays
that constitute the bulk of his oeuvre are characterized by their
intimidating density and extreme erudition–so much so Žižek’s loudest
critics have generally conceded that, in Harpham’s words, Žižek is “the
most extraordinary scholarly mind of his generation.”13 On closer
inspection, however, the roots of Žižek’s currently burgeoning popularity
can be found embedded in the academic writings that first spurred his
career. As everyone knows who has spent time with any of his many
books, one of the stylistic features that immediately sets them apart from
their academic peers is their frequent use of low- and popular-cultural
examples to exemplify high-cultural theories and arguments. Following
Sublime Object of Ideology, all of Žižek’s subsequent texts–Looking Awry:

12
Conversely, Paul A. Taylor has recently identified these notable personal traits
as potential assets for Žižek’s media persona; see his Žižek and the Media
(Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 3-4.
13
Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Criticism as Symptom: Slavoj Žižek and the End of
Knowledge,” in The Character of Criticism (Routledge: New York, 2006), 94.
 Evan Gottlieb 119

An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1991); Enjoy

Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (1992); and his first
edited collection, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan . .
. But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (1992)–announce their commitment to
such high-low juxtapositions in their very titles.
Whereas previous critical theorists like Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer culled their examples from “the culture industry” primarily to
bemoan their intellectual, moral, or aesthetic vacuity, from the start Žižek
has treated popular culture–especially Hollywood movies–as the ideal
testing ground for his interpretations of philosophical, Marxian, and
especially Lacanian theories. It is not merely a matter, as he outlines at the
start of Looking Awry, of using pop culture to exemplify or even to
“illustrate” theoretical positions, “and thus to spare us the effort of
effective thinking”:

“The point is rather that such an exemplification, such a mise-en-scène of

theoretical motifs renders visible aspects that would otherwise remain
unnoticed.”14

Primarily on the basis of the magnification effect that pop cultural

artifacts generally provide, it becomes possible not only to see our cultural
fantasies and fears writ large, but also to see the cracks and gaps in the
theories that make the interpretation of culture possible in the first place.
Far from situating even his most cerebral, philosophical criticism at a
distance from the lives (and especially the entertainments) of the masses,
in other words, Žižek has always stressed the importance of positioning his
theoretical work in close relation to the popular and the contemporary.
Seen in these contexts, his increasingly frequent forays into partially or
wholly non-academic channels arguably represent a logical extension of
his long-held convictions regarding the mutual imbrications of high and
low culture, as well as academic and popular subject matters. Having been
from the start seemingly just as at ease writing about The Lady Vanishes
and The Matrix as about Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Marx’s
Eighteenth Brumaire, his steady migration into the realms of current
events and popular entertainment seems, if not inevitably, then at least
entirely natural.
Moreover, although Harpham (among others) accuses Žižek of an
impersonal writing style, I would argue that in fact the reverse is true, and
that a large part of Žižek’s appeal has long lain in the passionate intensity

14
Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular
Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), 3.
120 The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West—to Himself?

and appealing idiosyncrasy of his writing. His prose, while easier to

decipher than his thick Slovenian accent, is frequently burnished with
Soviet-era dirty jokes, references to arcane Eastern European punk bands,
and other unmistakably personal features. Thus to my mind Harpham is
probably closer to unraveling the secret of Žižek’s success when he
observes that not only Žižek’s unorthodox writing style, but also his very
method of argumentation–his “cascading” use of examples, his obsessive
revisiting of the same set of theoretical problems–makes his work
essentially “para-academic,” that is, outside the norms of Western
academic practice.15 Precisely because he has never been bound by most
of the conventions that generally govern the structure and style of
academic writing and argumentation, Žižek has perhaps found it easier
than other academically trained writers to begin engaging non-specialist
audiences in more popular formats.
As Žižek has moved more aggressively into the mainstream, however,
he has begun noticeably to modulate both the vocabulary and the tenor of
his remarks and insights. Contrary to the accusations of some of his critics,
I do not think this has been done primarily or even purposefully as a form
of “selling out” or revealing his true, collaborationist colors. Instead, it
would seem, the changes in Žižek’s tone and content are designed to help
his ideas reach out a less academic, more general audience. On some
occasions such code-shifting has been relatively straightforward, resulting
in only minimal leakage of meaning. As mentioned above, Žižek has
always vigorously defended his frequent deployment of examples and
anecdotes drawn from popular movies. Thus in Enjoy Your Symptom!, for
example, he explains his method by stating (presumably for a primarily
academic readership) that “to put it in Hegelese: Hollywood is conceived
as a ‘phenomenology’ of the Lacanian Spirit, its appearing for the
common consciousness.”16 Almost two decades later, in a recent Times of
India interview, Žižek has translated this justification into far more
accessible terms:

“The Hollywood products are the best indicators of where we are moving
in our collective ideology. If you look at reality, it’s confusing, but in
Hollywood you get the distilled version of reality.”17

15
Harpham, Criticism, 86, 94.
16
Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
(New York and London: Routledge, 1992), xi.
17
Interview by Shobhan Saxena, The Times of India. January 10, 2010,
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-01-10/all-that-
 Evan Gottlieb 121

In this case, it is not that the earlier statement is true and the later one
false, since both have arguably informed Žižek’s methodology throughout
his career; rather, in the Times of India review he merely seems to have
chosen which of his justifications makes the most sense to articulate in a
more mainstream media context.
In other cases, however, the matter is less clear. Especially as he has
begun to comment more frequently on current events, Žižek’s attempts to
reach a broader audience have run into intellectual resistance on several
fronts simultaneously. Kirsch, for example, has accused Žižek of
knowingly softening or concealing the radical nature of his political
convictions for the purposes of entering the mainstream media.
Meanwhile, from near the other end of the political spectrum, Simon
Critchley has recently attacked Žižek on a variety of grounds for being
insufficiently committed to the praxis of radical change.18 It would seem,
in other words, that even as he been expanding his popular appeal, Žižek
has begun to disappoint everyone: too radical for the conservative
mainstream, yet not militant enough for the left intelligentsia, he has now
been accused of bad faith by both sides at once.19 An even more recent
review of Žižek, by John Gray in The New York Review of Books,
characteristically finds him both too enamored of violence and not radical
enough; brandishing what he apparently believes to be proof positive of
Žižek’s underlying hypocrisy, Gray’s penultimate paragraph concludes
that “The role of global public intellectual Žižek performs has emerged
along with a media apparatus and a culture of celebrity that are integral to
the current model of capitalist expansion.”20 The fact that Žižek is well

matters/28120874_1_buddhism-political-violence-philosopher (accessed May 11,

2011).
18
See, for example, Simon Critchley, “Foreword: Why Žižek Must be Defended,”
in Bowman and Stamp, xi-xvi.
19
“Bad faith,” of course, is a charge that Žižek is more than happy to lob back at
his critics. For his acerbic response to Kirsch’s review, see “Disputations: Who
Are You Calling Anti-Semitic?,” The New Republic, January 7 2009,
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/politics/disputations-who-are-you-calling-
anti-semitic (accessed Sept. 3, 2012); for his lengthy riposte to Critchley and the
other contributors in this collection, see his “Afterword: With Defenders Like
These, Who Needs Attackers?,” in The Truth of Žižek, eds. Bowman and Stamp,
197-255.
20
John Gray, “The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek,” The New York Review of
Books, July 12 2012,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/violent-visions-slavoj-
zizek/?page=2 (accessed August 31, 2012). True to form, Žižek quickly produced a
full-throated rebuttal of Gray’s review: “Not Less Than Nothing, But Simply
122 The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West—to Himself?

aware of this apparent contradiction–indeed, that he frequently takes

advantage of it–seems not to have occurred to Gray.
Such accusations of bad faith are, I will suggest below, both wrong and
ill-informed. At the same time, they nevertheless rest on a certain degree
of familiarity with the body of Žižek’s academically oriented writings. On
the one hand, here we may find support for the old adage that “a little
knowledge is a dangerous thing”; on the other hand, since only the most
devoted academic theorists could read even three-quarters of everything
Žižek has ever written, it seems unreasonable to expect mainstream
readers to be even moderately acquainted with his vast oeuvre. The fate of
Žižek’s attempts to gain a larger audience for his ideas thus seems likely to
rest almost entirely on the success or failure of his non-academic
pronouncements, especially those of his op-ed pieces, interviews,
documentary appearances, and so forth. In these popular media contexts,
moreover, Žižek regularly and repeatedly falls back on one of his
characteristic rhetorical strategies above all others: the polemical, often
paradoxical-sounding assertion. For example, during the past several
years, casual audiences could find Žižek making the following attention-
grabbing pronouncements:

On the subject of the ecological movement:

“So I think what we should do to confront properly the threat of ecological

catastrophe is not this New Age stuff of breaking through from this
technologically manipulative mood to find our roots in nature, but, on the
contrary, to cut off even more our roots in nature.”21

On the question of how Hitler could be understood to have been “not

violent enough”:

“In this precise sense of violence, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler:
Gandhi’s movement effectively endeavored to interrupt the basic
functioning of the British colonial sense.”22

Nothing,” http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1046-not-less-than-nothing-but-
simply-nothing (accessed Sept. 6 2012).
21
Slavoj Žižek, “Ecology,” interview by Astra Taylor, in Examined Life:
Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers (New York: New Press, 2009), 161.
22
Slavoj Žižek, “Disputations: Who Are You Calling Anti-Semitic?” He has
subsequently repeated this provocative claim – albeit using the opposite logic (that
Gandhi was more violent than Hitler because the former’s actions effectively
compelled the British to prolong their occupation of India) – in the January 2010
interview with The Times of India and elsewhere.
 Evan Gottlieb 123

On the relationship between public and private:

“These are problems of the commons, the resources we collectively own or

share. Nature is commons, biogenetics is commons, intellectual property is
commons. So how did Bill Gates become the richest man on earth? We are
paying him rent. He privatized part of the ‘general intellect,’ the social
network of communication–it’s a new enclosure of the commons.”23

All of the above follow a pattern well identified by Colin Davis: Žižek’s
propensity “to define a consensus and then to invert it. Whatever we may
think, Žižek likes to let us know that exactly the opposite is the case.”24

For academic readers well versed in both Žižek’s academic monographs

and the philosophical and critical traditions he regularly adapts and
deploys, however, on closer inspection the above statements turn out to be
not only logical and defensible but even somewhat unsurprising. His
assertion that the contemporary ecological crisis can only be confronted
effectively if we “cut off even more our roots in nature,” for example, is
clearly rooted in the tradition of ideological critique reaching back to
Feuerbach and Marx, and forward to the ecocritical work of writers like
Timothy Morton, who recommends that we learn to think of “ecology
without nature,” that is, to invent new ecological practices that do not
assume “nature” is a reified or unproblematic, pre-existing entity.25
Likewise, Žižek’s seemingly nonsensical assertion that Gandhi was more
violent than Hitler draws on critiques of fascism and National Socialism as
“the aestheticization of politics” and the logical extension of capitalism by
other means, first made by Walter Benjamin and members of the Frankfurt
School, as well as on the taxonomy of systemic violence in Žižek’s own
book Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (whose subtitle in turn echoes the
“looking awry” strategy of his early Lacanian studies). Finally, his
remarks about Bill Gates draw on the well-established Marxian critique of
the essentially exploitative nature of capitalism, as well as on newer,

23
Slavoj Žižek, “Wake Up and Smell the Apocalypse,” interview by Liz Else, io9,
September 2, 2010, http://io9.com/5627925/slavoj-iek-wake-up-and-smell-the-
apocalypse (accessed May 11, 2011).
24
Colin Davis, Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek,
and Cavell (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010), 126.
25
See Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental
Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007).
124 The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West—to Himself?

Spinozist-inspired work by the likes of Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri.26
In Žižek’s full-length academic books, these sorts of precedents,
influences, and intellectual interlocutors are often close to the surface,
where his naturally effusive writing style usually leads to relatively full
expositions of his ideas’ intellectual origins (if not always of their practical
ramifications).27 Very little such exposition, however, is made apparent or
explicit in the examples cited above–a point to which I will return
momentarily. Accordingly, for readers encountering Žižek’s ideas for the
first time in these popular formats, their effect may be startling, to say the
least. By way of example, let me cite the following passages from just the
first few of the many comments left online by readers of Kirsch’s
notorious review–a self-selecting group, to be sure, but one that seems
particularly likely to be unfamiliar with the vast body of Žižek’s academic
oeuvre: “Lefties, get over yourselves”; “Really excellent article, a brilliant
unmasking of that disgusting man”; “Why such a pseudo-sophisticated
nutcase gets so much attention is something a good psychoanalyst might
be able to figure out”; “This Žižek is a type [or] specimen of the kind of
unworldly silliness that infects and degrades academia like a terminal drug
habit.”28 Splenetic name-calling, the stock-in-trade of many anonymous
online commenters (“trolls”), is obviously well exemplified by this
selection. Of greater interest than the venom Žižek seems to inspire in
many mainstream readers, however, is the central complaint of the final
commenter quoted above: that Žižek represents everything that is
stereotypically dreadful about academics in general, and left-wing
academics in particular. This idea, in fact, runs like a red thread through
many of the comments on Kirsch’s review and, moreover, through many
of the online responses generated by other pieces by or relating to Žižek.
Repeatedly, detractors assert that Žižek exemplifies some dangerous
combination of (in order of censoriousness) idealism, elitism, cynicism,
dogmatism, and totalitarianism.29

26
See, e.g., Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in
the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
27
But for a staunch defense of the practical ramifications of Žižek’s ideas, see
McMillan, Žižek and Communist Strategy, esp. 134-64.
28
See the online “Comments” section following Kirsch’s review, “The Deadly
Jester,” The New Republic December 2, 2008,
http://www.tnr.com/article/books/the-deadly-jester (accessed Sept. 2, 2012).
29
Somewhat prophetically, Žižek wrote about the popular abuse of the accusation
of “totalitarianism” two decades ago: see Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five
Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London and New York: Verso, 1992).
 Evan Gottlieb 125

Such responses underscore the high degree of resistance that Žižek’s

ideas seem bound to encounter from a mainstream audience that has
become inured (at least in North America) to hearing politicians publicly
denounce their opponents as “socialists” for merely suggesting, say, that
corporate tax loopholes could be closed or at least tightened. But they also
point toward something else: the form Žižek’s ideas are being forced to
take in order to reach a broader audience may be overdetermining their
frequently negative reception. As Marshall McLuhan (over)stated decades
ago, the medium is the message.30 Certainly, Žižek has been forced to
adapt his naturally prolix style to the decidedly more stringent space and
time constraints of newspaper columns and interview spots. As a result,
his arguments and assertions are reaching an expanded audience without
the benefit of being accompanied by the theoretical framework–his unique
synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis, German idealism, and Marxism–
that gives his academic texts their internal consistency and philosophical
coherence. Removed from this clarifying and deepening intellectual
context, his characteristically pugnacious, counter-intuitive arguments
seem to at best to invite misreadings, and at worst to reinforce prejudices
already nursed by a general public highly prone (at least in America) to
anti-intellectualism.
Take, for example, Žižek’s provocative interpretation of the Abu
Ghraib torture scandal. According to the Slovenian philosopher, the
explanations that the American soldiers involved were simply following
(unspoken) orders, taking revenge for the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, or even just indulging their individual predilections for sadism,
are incomplete. These rationalizations must be supplemented, Žižek has
argued, by the recognition that the soldiers were de facto initiating their
prisoners into American culture through what amounted to a series of
degrading hazing rituals.31 For readers familiar with Žižek’s previous
deployments of Lacanian concepts like jouissance and the essential
imposture of the Master, this interpretation is logical and compelling,
regardless of whether one agrees with it. For an audience with little or no
understanding of this intellectual framework, however, it is not hard to see
why Žižek’s claim that Abu Ghraib effectively represents “the obscene

30
See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1994), esp. 7-21.
31
Slavoj Žižek, “Between Two Deaths,” London Review of Books 26, no. 11 (June
3, 2004): 19. This article was subsequently republished later that same month, with
an extended subtitle (“The Culture of Torture”), in the online journal 16Beaver; see
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001084.php (accessed May 11
2011).
126 The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West—to Himself?

underside of US popular culture” would sound not only horrifying (which

perhaps it is) but downright offensive. The fact that the phrase “obscene
underside” refers to a psychoanalytic state of affairs–in Žižekian parlance,
it is the necessary obverse of the Ego’s official position–and therefore is
not specific to American culture, likewise can hardly be expected to be
understood by the average reader, especially one who does not take it upon
herself to use Žižek’s public pronouncements as a gateway to exploring
his more substantial texts.32 Even in this best-case scenario, however, I am
far from certain that clarity would be forthcoming. In fact, the expanded
version of this argument in Žižek’s book Violence: Six Sideways
Reflections–itself written for a larger audience than his fellow philosophers
and academics–does contain a short discussion of the Lacanian principles
underpinning this interpretation; yet even here it not only remains
relatively compressed, but also gets awkwardly broken up by several
characteristic digressions on key movies that exhibit similar structures.33
In his review of Violence, moreover, Kirsch (purposefully?) reproduces
only the most superficially outrageous-sounding bits of Žižek’s argument,
once more shearing off their theoretical contexts, thus effectively
summoning more howls of indignation from his mainstream readers.
Žižek is aware of this problem; in his responses to both Kirsch and
Gray, for example, he takes them to task for radically decontextualizing
his arguments and well as willfully misrepresenting them. My point,
however, is that such misappropriations and misreadings seem inevitable,
if not downright invited by the ways in which Žižek presents himself and
his arguments to the general public. Of course, he is far from the first
intellectual to discover that increasing public exposure is often
accompanied by increasing misapprehension and even condemnation; Jean
Baudrillard and Edward Said (who would otherwise seem to have little in
common) come to mind as immediate predecessors in this regard. Lately,
Žižek has even been striking a defiant tone, telling The Times of India that
he doesn’t care whether the general public dismisses him as “not serious”
or demonizes him as “threatening” and “dangerous,” and complaining to
the The Globe and Mail (one of Canada’s national newspapers) about the

32
Interestingly, this is precisely how Adam Kotsko characterizes his role in his
recent review essay on Žižek: “He is, in short, a gateway drug [to “philosophy and
critical theory” in general], and I’m the pusher.” Kotsko, “How to Read Žižek,”
Los Angeles Review of Books, Sept. 2, 2012,
http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/how-to-read-zizek (accessed Sept. 4, 2012).
33
Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, 171-77.
 Evan Gottlieb 127

“propaganda against me.”34 But what, we might ask, is a public intellectual

without her or his public? Nearly two decades ago, Said himself asserted
that

“One task of the intellectual is the effort to break down the stereotypes and
reductive categories that are so limiting to human thought and
communication”35

–a statement that, if his recent media blitz is anything to go by, Žižek

seems likely to endorse. But what happens when, in the process of
attempting to reach the public, that same intellectual inadvertently yet
repeatedly reinforces the very “stereotypes and reductive categories”
surrounding him and his fellow cognoscenti? It is bad enough, one might
conclude, that Žižek’s Leftist proclivities have him swimming against
today’s tide of rightwing popular sentiment (at least in North America).
Add to this the fact that, as I have tried to demonstrate, his public
pronouncements issue from a theoretical matrix that is almost uniquely
complex and multi-layered, and the odds on Žižek meeting his own stated
goals as a public intellectual–that is, to prod the general public into taking
a “hard” (i.e. critical) look at its own “ideological underground”–seem
longer than ever.
Furthermore, notwithstanding the several elements of his work that
would seem to make it suitable for “crossover appeal,” I want to suggest
that Žižek’s most characteristic critical method may in fact mitigate
against the successful dissemination of his messages to the general public.
Its superficial form, as exemplified in the passages already quoted, is the
counter-intuitive or highly polemical assertion. But the method itself is
perhaps best summed up by a phrase that Žižek himself frequently uses–so
frequently, in fact, that the book series he edits for The MIT Press is
named after it–to describe his favored critical strategy: the short circuit. In
Žižek’s description,

“A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network–

faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning.

34
Quoted in Matthew Hays, “Slavoj Žižek on Film’s Ideological Component,” The
Globe and Mail, Sept. 6, 2012 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/awards-and-
festivals/tiff/slavoj-zizek-on-films-ideological-
component/article4524517/?cmpid=rss1 (accessed Sept. 7, 2012).
35
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1994), xi.
128 The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West—to Himself?

Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for
a critical reading?”36

Mixing psychoanalytic and deconstructive formulations, he concludes that

“the aim of such an approach is . . . the inherent decentering of the

interpreted text, which brings to light its ‘unthought,’ its disavowed
presuppositions and consequences.”37

Such a purposefully incendiary technique, it seems, is the logic that

animates Žižek when he temporarily holds close seemingly radically
different figures or planes of cultural phenomena: Gandhi and Hitler, Abu
Ghraib and a fraternity, Bill Gates and a slumlord. Ideally, this strategy
aims to ignite sparks of recognition in the reader. It is not simply an
arbitrarily chosen strategy; careful readers of his most recent scholarly
chef d’oeuvre, Less Than Nothing will recognize its origins in what Žižek
there identifies as “the most elementary figure of dialectical reversal”:

“transposing an epistemological obstacle into the thing itself, as its

ontological failure . . . [this insight] is far more radical . . . than all the
combined anti-totality topics of contingency-alterity-heterogeneity.”38

Again, however, the problem remains: how much of this can the average,
mainstream reader be expected to understand primarily through
implication and analogy?
Moreover, for all its polemical virtuosity, Žižek’s short circuitry seems
to rely on the traditional Marxist assumption the reader’s false
consciousness can be lifted or shocked away by an appropriate dose of
counter-discursive truth-telling. As Žižek himself is well aware, however,
the simple imposition of a “false consciousness” is not really how most
ideological discourse operates; indeed, his consistent citations of Peter
Sloterdijk’s theory of “cynical reason”–in which the subject recognizes the
falsity of a given ideological formation, yet still behaves as though she
thinks it’s true–repeatedly remark upon this phenomenon. Nevertheless, it
is precisely the operation of such “cynical reason,” in conjunction with the
general lack of familiarity with Žižek’s more academic writings that, I
fear, make Žižek’s “short circuits” liable to appear to mainstream

36
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press,
2006), ix.
37
Ibid.
38
Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 17. See also Fabio Vighi, On Žižek’s Dialectics:
Surplus, Subtraction, Sublimation (London and New York: Continuum, 2010).
 Evan Gottlieb 129

audiences as little more than irresponsible acts of intellectual arson. The

more outrageous Žižek’s critical juxtapositions (appear to) become, in
other words, the more easily he can be dismissed as another “specimen” of
“unworldly [academic] silliness.”
Finally, I want to suggest, Žižek’s frequent reduction of his
sophisticated dialectical methodology to a relatively blunt “short-circuit”
approach may put him at another significant disadvantage when it comes
to the possibility of acquiring the degree of widespread recognition
necessary to be a truly public intellectual. As mentioned above, other
academics-turned-public-intellectuals have certainly put forth views that
generated significant amounts of pushback from mainstream audiences
and media outlets; Chomsky, Said, Baudrillard, and West all fit this
description, as do Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Martha Nussbaum,
to name only a few others. What all of the above figures except Žižek have
in common, however, is a consistently recognizable critical position or
school with which–for better or for worse–they are indelibly linked in the
general public’s view. Fairly or not, for example, Baudrillard was linked
indelibly to his claim that “the [First] Gulf War did not happen” (even
though the nature of that claim was generally misunderstood); Derrida was
strongly associated with “deconstructionism” (even though he repeatedly
distanced himself from such simplified formalizations of his methods), and
Judith Butler has maintained relatively consistent notions of
“performativity” and “citationality” at the center of most phases of her
varied career. The high degree of explicit continuity in these intellectuals’
critical pronouncements on public affairs, in other words, has lent them a
degree of recognition that has in turn allowed them to make significant, if
by no means widely accepted, impacts outside of academia. By contrast,
Žižek’s “short circuits” may consistently turn conventional wisdom upside
down–indeed, Paul A. Taylor has recently argued that this is precisely his
raison d’être as a theorist–but, since each of his dialectical inversions of
common sense results in a seemingly different position, they do not readily
appear to form a recognizably consistent platform or set of principles
(beyond a general Leftism that, as noted above, generally hinders rather
than helps Žižek’s wider acceptance). Of course, there is a consistent
method to Žižek’s apparent madness, but since it issues from the
sophisticated fusion of Marxian, philosophical, and psychoanalytic
theoretical frameworks and methodologies discussed above, we find
ourselves confronting the conundrum whereby Žižek’s public
pronouncements are truly comprehensible only by those who are already
familiar with his more academic texts. Žižek’s short circuits, in other
words, seem unavoidably to run the risk of either preaching to the choir
130 The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West—to Himself?

(so to speak), or of appearing to the general public as a series of

spectacular but discontinuous and ultimately evanescent interventions,
capable of generating a good deal of immediate heat but very little lasting
light.
As one of the few positive evaluations of Žižek’s oeuvre to appear in a
popular publication, Adam Kotsko’s recent review essay in The Los
Angeles Times Book Review is both a hopeful sign and a case in point.
Written by a sympathetic academic specialist, albeit for a mainstream
audience, Kotsko’s avowed goal is to encourage popular readers to give
Žižek a chance:

“Although Žižek’s work can be difficult to get into at first, he is one of the
most engaging and thought-provoking writers working in philosophy
today, with a unique ability to get people excited about philosophy and
critical theory.”39

I wholeheartedly agree with Kotsko; his recognition that Žižek needs such
help to seem comprehensible (and not merely reprehensible) to a popular
audience, however, is itself symptomatic of the challenges faced by the
Slovenian theorist. The fact that these challenges have taken somewhat
different forms over the course of his career, moreover, likely says at least
as much about the changing intellectual milieux of the past few decades,
as it does about the inherently provocative nature of Žižek’s work. When
he first began to receive sustained attention in the English-speaking world
in the early 1990s, highbrow, non-academic media outlets like The New
York Times and The New Republic regularly lumped Žižek in with those
“postmodernists,” like Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose apparent lack
of belief in stable meanings and Truth (with a capital “T”) was routinely
frowned upon. Žižek, for his part, was clear from the start that he had no
desire to be included in such company: significant portions of several of
his texts from the 1990s and early 2000s are devoted to critiquing Derrida,
Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and other theorists who, for better or worse,
were associated with postmodernism.40 Moreover, Žižek’s manifest
investments in the ahistorical insights of psychoanalysis and the grand
narratives of Marxian theory clearly put him at odds with the central tenets

39
Kotsko, “How to Read Žižek.”
40
See, e.g., Žižek’s critique of Derrida in For they know not what they do:
Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 72-80; of
Foucault in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London
and New York: Verso, 1999), 251-57; and of Deleuze in Organs Without Bodies:
On Deleuze and Consequences (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), passim.
 Evan Gottlieb 131

of postmodern theory, at least as represented in its strongest forms by

Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Yet now that the postmodern
moment seems definitively to have passed, Žižek is once more being
attacked, mutatis mutandis, for allegedly cleaving too closely to the very
dogmas that, during postmodernism’s heyday, he was supposed to have
been scandalously rejecting.
Recently, Henry A. Giroux–a longtime proponent of a vigorous public
sphere, and himself something of a public intellectual, albeit not on
Žižek’s scale–has argued that public intellectuals need not and indeed
should not sacrifice the complexity of their ideas or simplify their
discourses simply to meet the low standards of today’s “dumbed-down
cultural apparatus . . . in which language and thought are emptied of
content.”41 In theory–no pun intended–I entirely support this argument. In
practice, as I hope this chapter makes clear, the situation is more
complicated, especially for a public intellectual like Žižek whose entire
modus operandus is built on a theoretical framework that is inherently
resistant to popularization. Paul Taylor suggests that in today’s media-
saturated world, Žižek self-consciously plays the role of a latter-day
Diogenes, intentionally offending the public’s sensibilities in order to
shock them out of their dogmatic platitudes.xl In terms of Žižek’s
aspirations to be a public intellectual, Taylor is probably correct. By way
of conclusion, however, let me suggest a less sanguine figure for
comparison. In March 2008, Žižek gave a much-anticipated presentation at
the CUNY Graduate Center, timed to reflect the 40th anniversary of the
May ’68 upheavals. The glossy promotional poster featured a prominent
by-line in aggressive capital letters: “RESIST ATTACK UNDERMINE”
[see Fig. Gottlieb-1]. But the accompanying illustration, which takes up
most of the poster, is even more eye-catching: in the background, old-
fashioned bi-planes swarm, while in the foreground, threatening to burst
out of the frame, a creature with Žižek’s (photoshopped) head and the
body of a giant ape runs amok in downtown Manhattan. Given Žižek’s
long-standing fascination with Hollywood movies, at first glance this
image of the Slovenian theorist as a critical King Kong could not seem
more apt. And yet, a second look should remind most viewers that, for all
its destructive fury, the Hollywood great ape’s greatest success is merely
to mobilize the forces of reaction against him. No doubt, Žižek is too
brilliant and savvy to share the critical equivalent of King Kong’s sad,
bullet-riddled plunge from the heights. But if he does not find more
effective ways to translate his philosophical and theoretical insights into

41
Taylor, Žižek and the Media, xi.
132 The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West—to Himself?

Figure 2: Žižek, RESIST ATTACK UNDERMINE

 Evan Gottlieb 133

public pronouncements that are incisive and provocative without so

readily lending themselves to misinterpretation, it seems all too possible
that his recent advances toward mainstream recognition may achieve little
beyond eliciting a similarly enraged, increasingly reactionary response
from the general public. This would be the most dangerous –and certainly
the most regrettable–outcome of all.
DEFINING THE POSTCONTEMPORARY MOMENT

CHRISTOPHER K. BROOKS

Disenchantment
To the minds of many critical thinkers, postmodern discourse is under
attack and, some opine, should be. Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli open
their 2002 work Postmodernism: The Key Figures with the succinct
observation,

“Although we clearly cannot do without them, few of us are

straightforwardly happy with the terms postmodern, postmodernism, and
postmodernity.”1

They assert that

“a good many postcolonial critics, who are arguably among

postmodernism’s many heirs, have assiduously distanced themselves from
postmodernism”2

and explain soon thereafter,

“Perhaps the main problem with postmodernism is that it would appear to

have been used for so many different purposes and to have been applied to
so many things that there is always at least one usage of the term . . . that a
given writer, artist, or theorist . . . can with reason, seriously object to.”3

So this problematic and all-encompassing way of seeing things is, as

Bertens and Natoli assert, still “applicable” and still of great “utility”
despite the fact it renders its users “unhappy.” It seems that the disavowal
of this ubiquitous and sometimes ponderous discourse would indeed be

1
Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli, eds., Postmodernism: The Key Figures (Malden,
MA: Blackwell P, 2002), xi.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
 Christopher K. Brooks 135

desirable, as some have personified in their refusal to employ the term.

Affect Theory, for example, tends to disdain even mentioning the word.
Several scholars at the 2012 ACLA session on Postcontemporary Theory
offered diatribes against postmodernism. I personally hear the word as a
theoretical equivalent to the word “interesting” when applied to modern art
or a new recipe: a signifier so readily available and applicable to
evaluation that we use it without reflection. It is now equivalent to how
Ania Loomba sees the word postcolonial: “no more than a helpful
shorthand,” one that, in its ubiquity, is guilty “of collapsing various [usages]
so that the specificities of all of them are blurred.”4 If the prefix “post” is
considered, one may ask, “After what? Its first mention? 1950? 1960? A
momentous moment in art? Literature? Thought?” Or does everyone simply
accept the term in 2013 because we have been accepting it for as long as
most of us have been alive? I paraphrase much of what I have heard in
conference exchanges here—but heard often. Yet Postmodernism is merely
a theory, right? Anyone can ignore it, as academics might ignore
deconstruction or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or is this the case?
Fredric Jameson is eerily perceptive about how postmodernity
functions and, in a sense, requires a new way of seeing things that aligns
with what I will describe as “postcontemporary” thought. If a new period
has begun, as some have argued since 9/11, and if that period could be
called perhaps a postcontemporary one (to be defined later), such an event
will “call into question the usefulness of the very category of
postmodernism.” Jameson asserts that works affiliated with postmodernism

“will then be assimilated back into classical modernism proper, so that the
‘postmodern’ becomes little more than the form taken by the authentically
modern in our own period, and a mere dialectical intensification of the old
modernist impulse toward innovation.”5

John Fiske views the ties between capitalism and postmodernity in a

similar way, citing this tandem’s ability “to reproduce itself and to
incorporate into itself the forces of resistance and opposition.”6 Just as

4
Ania Loomba, “Situating Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies,” in Literary
Theory: An Anthology, Second Edition, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 1108-9.
5
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke UP, 1991), 59.
6
John Fiske, “Culture, Ideology, Interpellation,” in Literary Theory: An
Anthology, Second Edition, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2004), 1269.
136 Defining the Postcontemporary Moment

Marx once argued that the only goal of capital is to produce more capital,
it becomes postmodernity’s function to assimilate change, whether that
involves an “impulse” to innovate or to oppose.
In effect, postmodern discourse is a self-renewing ideology that
converts modern innovations into postmodernist ideologies as time
marches forward. Indeed, the “impulse toward innovation” of which
Jameson speaks requires this, so much so that other literary criticisms,
whether feminism, psychoanalytical theory, or reader response theory, all
seem now, at the time of this writing, to come from the “now-old” period
of the 1970s and 80s as products of postmodernity’s critique of modernity.
As Bertens and Natoli declare above, the postcolonialists were the “heirs”
of postmodernity, the genetic extension of the dominant ideological
discourse, as were all new theories of the 70s and 80s. No one considers
those ideologies “new” any longer, but they certainly seemed innovative
and exciting when they emerged well after the “modern period” had been
designated as closed. This is clearly stated by Sean Homer, in his
paraphrase/summary of Jameson in Postmodernism: The Key Figures.
Homer observes,

“With modernism the sphere of culture was seen to have retained a degree
of semi-autonomy; whether from the left or right, it retained an
oppositional stance and critical distance toward capital.”7

Homer adds,

“Postmodern culture has become fully integrated into commodity

production in general, annulling its oppositional and critical stance. . . . As
a concept, [postmodernism] allows for both continuity and difference.”8

So postmodernism possesses a measured autonomy, is shaped by

commodity production as much as intellectual insight, and is permissive
enough to stay the course and encourage change. Yet that which represents
change, Jameson writes above, will simply be assimilated into the
“authentically modern postmodern.” What was innovation is now the
classical modern, the “new” having become the established way of seeing
things for which postmodernity remains the ever-present, ever-renewing
response. It is the reaction to any other intellectual action. As Homer
asserts,

7
Sean Homer, “Fredric Jameson,” in Postmodernism: The Key Figures, eds. Hans
Bertens and Joseph Natoli, 184.
8
Ibid.
 Christopher K. Brooks 137

“Postmodernism thus undercuts the very foundations of practical solidarity

and agency, ultimately denying the possibility for any real or meaningful
social change.”9

“Change” will recur as the crucial idea throughout this essay. This,
moreover, must be the case:

“In the present instance it seems clear that a range of competing

formulations (“poststructuralism,” “postindustrial society,” this or that
McLuhanite nomenclature) were unsatisfactory insofar as they were too
rigidly specified and marked by their area of provenance (philosophy,
economics, and the media respectively); however suggestive, therefore,
they could not occupy the mediatory position within the various
specialized dimensions of post-contemporary life that was required.
“Postmodern,” however, seems to have been able to welcome in the
appropriate areas of daily life or the quotidian; its cultural resonance,
appropriately vaster than the merely aesthetic or artistic, distracts suitably
from the economic while allowing newer economic materials and
innovations . . . to be recatalogued under the new heading.”10

Change, or what seems to represent change, simply involves the “re-

cataloging” of thought. Of interest to this essay collection, more
importantly, is the mention of “postcontemporary life” as that which found
the various other “isms and ologies” of the past too limited to serve.
Indeed, Jameson’s study on this subject is titled Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and appears now as one of the earliest
entries in the Duke University Press series Post-Contemporary
Interventions. This series, also published in 2007, Jameson on Jameson,
wherein one finds this observation:

“it might be possible, in a specifically Marxist way, to reappropriate a

periodizing concept which argued, against Marxism, that modern or
postcontemporary society no longer obeyed the classical laws of capital,
production, social classes, and their struggle and the like.”11

Such a statement again invokes the idea of postcontemporary society, one

that may have chosen to reject a way of thinking—postindustrialism,
poststructuralism—through the reappropriation of a dominant concept, in
this case Marxism. It appears that a “postcontemporary” gesture, then, is

9
Ibid., 181.
10
Jameson, Postmodernism, xiii-xiv.
11
Fredric Jameson, Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism
(Durham: Duke UP, 2007), 19.
138 Defining the Postcontemporary Moment

affiliated with the revision (the longer quote employs “recatalogued”) of

established norms of cultural thinking to bring them within a modern
perception of utility. The other ideologies mentioned by Jameson lost
footing, lost usefulness, because they were limited by discipline. No one
wants to view life through a single lens. One could argue that such
statements must appear in the Post-Contemporary Interventions series
because what Jameson and the other writers of that series are attempting is
the almost impossible and, to some, highly desirable task of “breaking”
from postmodern thought, or at least negotiating the release of
“postcontemporary society” from it. To do this, innovation must be
“recatalogued” (to use Jameson’s term) as existing outside the assimilating
influence of postmodernity. As he declares, “postcontemporary life”
requires this opportunity. All of this must be done, Homer writes, “to
ground this most slippery and ephemeral of phenomena in the objective
transformations of the global economy.”12 Innovation, change,
transformation—these must be liberated ideologically, theoretically, and
linguistically as more than “impulses.” The task, then, becomes to identify
and understand “postcontemporary” meanings, in particular as Jameson
employs the term to the society in which postmodernism resides. Many, it
can be said, are “disenchanted” with postmodernity.

Postcontemporary Impulses
The Duke University series now offers this description of how their
Post-Contemporary Interventions series participates in the theoretical
debate over postmodernism:

“Theory—as a driving impulse in all modern thought - emerged from the

realization that the two antithetical temptations of intellectual and cultural
work today—system and empiricism—were related symptoms that
demanded perpetual critique and rectification. In a wide variety of fields,
theory resisted these temptations in equally antithetical ways: wielding the
weapon of ideological analysis against system (whether philosophical,
aesthetic or more generally disciplinary), and that of totalization against the
irrepressible and cyclical revival of empiricism as such—the fear of the
universal or the generalizable, the blind faith in the reality of the singular
"fact". Theory stands for history by its very post-contemporaneity,
identifying what is progressive in present-day intellectual trends by
projecting their new directions into the future. In that sense everyone
practices theory, but the thing itself is always unseasonable and
unwelcome, uncomfortable and unmentionable. It is in this no-man's-land

12
Homer, Jameson, 188.
 Christopher K. Brooks 139

that our series seeks out new kinds of intervention and new kinds of
insights.”13

The use of the word “new” here, located, I will argue, in a

postcontemporary statement rather than a postmodern one, marks the
liberating gesture of this new theory. The four negative prefixes in the
penultimate sentence, followed by the “no-man’s-land” reference, gesture
toward an opposition that means to succeed by negation: negation of the
postmodern past in the emergence of an “ongoing present.” Change, the
“impulse to innovate,” and a willingness to obliterate the box instead of
working outside of it are the conditions of an ongoing present.
The postcontemporary condition is described, then, by those
disciplines that recognize and embrace the technology and applications,
however theoretical, that require postcontemporary thinking. As the
definition from the Duke University series above attests, postcontemporary
ideologies are always future oriented. Indeed, it seems a tenet of
postcontemporary thought that Santayana’s admonition to never forget the
past, lest we be doomed to repeat it, must be rethought: by attending too
closely to the past, we are forced to revise it, to “get it right this time.” We
witness the revision of political parties, the reintroduction of muscle cars,
the constant remakes of television programs and movies, and the
rehabilitation of old property and disgraced politicians. Some voters voted
out incumbents, only to get more partisanship; Obama was elected on a
platform of change but filibusters are as common as ever. The more things
change, the more they stay the same could be postmodernity’s motto.
Postmodernism is obsessed with its past, its coming-into-beingness, its
shaping of and reflecting of the last half of the twentieth century so it can
impact its present. But, as already stated, postcontemporists attend to the
future. This is crucial for those who came through the academy as
pluralists, practitioners of multiple theories in a multi-faceted,
multicultural world taught to embrace difference. Postmodernism wishes
to assert that the emergence of multiple discourses was merely an early
chapter in the autobiography of postmodern discourse, all fruits from a
single tree. What is needed is a new way of thinking in a society—a
postcontemporary society—that realizes it has been the locus of nothing
but new practices for fifty years, all of which have been assimilated and
packaged for them under one singular heading. And to that point, Jameson

13
Duke University Web Page, “Post-Contemporary Interventions,”
http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ProductList.php?viewby=series&id=42&page
num=all&sort=newest.
140 Defining the Postcontemporary Moment

identifies us as living in a postcontemporary society, not a postmodern

one, so I will start with that difference.
For example, I first read about postcontemporary applications in the
summary of an agricultural seminar that took place in Albuquerque in
2009, where the crucial proposition was concerned with meeting a
growing need for food and which insisted that the agricultural community
re-think seasonal growth. The longstanding logic of preparing a field in
spring, planting and nurturing in summer, and harvesting in fall—the stuff
of song, film, of novels and ballads—has been seen as outdated, a sort of
“period” thinking that applies to the 19th and 20th centuries but which must
be revised to meet current needs. The following passage, the conference
description, illustrates what postcontemporary thought often requires:

“The impetus of this symposium proposal is the vision for American

agriculture over the next 50 years (in press at Conservation Biology,
December 2008) by Nugent, Jackson, Christensen, and White. Nugent and
colleagues elucidate a vision of what future agroecosystems should look
like and the policy instruments needed to get there. In our symposium, we
want to expand upon their vision by examining which specific ecological
processes and properties inherent in natural ecosystems need to be carried
over to a post-contemporary agriculture that does not rely on cheap fuel
and fertilizer, is productive, is resilient, and maintains biodiversity.”14

This example of how postcontemporary is used outside of literary

theory is significant. It represents the tension between the past (that which
must be “carried over”) and the future-oriented system that has determined
that contemporary methods will no longer serve. Agriculture rethinking
fertilizer? Crops that do not exhaust the soil? This can only be discussed
through the creation of the term agroecosystems, the type of neologism
that postmodern discourse cannot claim as its own and might have trouble
assimilating. The natural must be enhanced to maintain productivity, not
deplete it. In many ways, one could argue, all farm techniques are, in fact,
“agroecosystems.” But instead of employing this neologism as a label, this
2009 conference wishes to establish agroecosystem farming as a practice,
a way of behaving. This is an aspect of postcontemporary thinking that
distinguishes it—its practicality. Jameson, after all, can theorize about
postmodern discourse, but he accepts without reflection the
postcontemporary society in which theory is debated. Cogito ergo sum.

14
Ecological Society of America, “SYMP 9 - From Genes to Watersheds:
Developing a Post-Contemporary Agriculture (1888-2058),” paper presented at
94th ESA Meeting, August 2-7, 2009, http://eco.confex.com/eco/2009/.
 Christopher K. Brooks 141

The theorist has his reader; the soil produces its crop—but those readers
and that crop can change. Indeed, for innovation to occur, readers must
change their expectations, their demands. Postmodernity today is as given
as democracy, capitalism, and Christianity: few think beyond any of the
assumed values. One can “theorize” about this in literary studies. Other
disciplines, however, will have their say.
Agriculture is not the only business thinking outside the box. The
image following, which is simply called “PC Castle” and was circulated
on the internet in 2007 and 2008 under a search for postcontemporary, but
which cannot now be easily found, suggests that a simple postcontemporary
gesture is to merge old and new at a physical level.

Figure 3: PC Castle

This image represents a synecdoche of compromise: do not toss out the

old, use it as a foundation. Another visual idea that has come and gone,
“PC Castle” offers a possibility that other mediums have made real. For
example, one museum, the Sydney (Australia) Museum of Contemporary
Art, has conceived the idea of art without frames, of “blurring the
boundaries of performance.”15 They posit walls used as video screens
where images of great works are projected and varied. The hallways and
foyers will be decorated in artistic styles so that the museum itself becomes
a piece of art, while the contents therein continue to change in such a way

15
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, posting for March 31 to May
14, 2008, http://www.mca.com.au/.
142 Defining the Postcontemporary Moment

that the museum cannot be described as a museum of regional or

contemporary art but rather as a postcontemporary museum which, through
image projection and mutable walls, can accommodate all forms of art. To
quote the Nafas Art Magazine,

“In art, post-contemporaneity is visible in the formatting of international

dialogues and exchanges and in the development of a globalization which
has the tendency to drown out all originality outside of the styles that the
art system created for itself.”16

Art must resubmit to a new “formatting,” a re-“development” of sorts, to

avoid becoming a mere postmodern or historical period. This “exchange”
must become an ongoing process. This has led to the most progressive
innovation in art, the new Invisible Museum of Post-Contemporary Art,
which specializes in offering “uncategorized art.”17 While much of this art
is located online, the art works do, on infrequent occasions, move from
physical site to site, sometimes vacant galleries or empty studios,
transforming those chosen settings of “contemporary art” to postcontemporary
art museums: those that blur lines and eschew category without dubbing
such art “postmodern.” When one visits the IMOPCA website, one finds
links to galleries, testimonials, contacts, and favorites. But each link
reveals the same statement: “The IMOPCA has not established any [links,
galleries, testimonials, contacts, favorites].” An illustration of the
museum’s gift shop is offered—but no museum exists. An illustration of
the Museum itself, as it will look when built, has come and gone, with no
mention of the architect or site. Art works appear on the website with the
notation that those selected works were housed and enjoyed a showing just
last week—but the visitor has missed the showing that was never pre-
announced. This is art as flash mob, spontaneous events recorded as
having already taken place while the next showing is allegedly in the
planning stage. This is more, then, than an online art showing. Why have
empty links and mention future plans when the future posited for those
links and structures is intentionally ironic? The idea of the museum is the
museum, its online images validation of the claim that those images
compose the Invisible Museum of Post-Contemporary Art. If one cannot

16
NAFAS Art Magazine, “The Issues and Networks of Creation during the Post-
Contemporary Era,” from Symposium 2007,
http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/content/view/print/9460.
17
Invisible Museum of Post-Contemporary Art (IMOPCA), changing
website/stream/images, http://eventful.com/events/imopca-invisible-museum-post-
contemporary-art.
 Christopher K. Brooks 143

build a museum from stone, build it with words. As the changes in

agriculture and art suggest, change—ongoing innovation—is necessary to
postcontemporary thinking. This may be the most useful lesson take from
the dot.com “bubble”: some ideas function only at the idea level; capital
need not be exchanged. “Post” does not have to refer to following time: it
can mean simply “to supplant.” Postcontemporary seeks, it appears, to
supplant the present. Rather than envisioning “heirs,” postcontemporary
theory seeks new DNA.
This thinking is well evolved, as the following citation demonstrates:

“Post-contemporary society is strongly related to the values of utility,

putting in plain words the description of a civilization that meets the higher
human real needs for a vast majority in an advanced universe, shifting
forward into new paradigms of and Post-Tylorism managements. In
addition, Post-contemporary is an attempt to bestow our social
opportunities to flourish in the utmost of their potential creativity, rather
than struggling with precast sachems or sinking in artificial consumerism.
The objective therefore is to resolve the cause which goes against the self
flourishing, the self-fulfillment jointly with collective harmony, by purge
them from the routine of contemporary habits and adopt those post-
contemporary values which creativity, holism, complexity, justice, quality,
passion, interconnection, responsibility.… This is an educational training
versus the belief in continued economic growth in order to gain the ability
to grasp complex systems within long-term problems of the human
tendency to bury uncomfortable truths, the habit to relate only to what can
be seen close to us and see only one cause to one effect. All this or more is
preventing our safe passage to a sustainable world.”18

One can argue that what this new system of thought desires most is a “safe
passage” from 9/11 to the immediate moment, because that moment was
shaped by 9/11. The present, therefore, is a moment of always-in-
transcendence. Behind us is dismay, with us uncertainty; both are less
desirable that the kind of potential-filled future envisioned by Peaucelle.
Developing new ideas represents the key notion of postcontemporary
thinking, best said by António Cerveira Pinto, one leading proponent of
the movement:

“Whilst in Europe there was an avant-garde revolutionary tendency to

destroy the past and create the future, in a kind of super-fast overtaking of
the present, in the USA, on the contrary, energies were focused on the here

18
Jean-Louis Peaucelle, “From Taylorism to post-Taylorism: Simultaneously
pursuing several Management objectives.” Journal of Organizational Change
Management, 13, no. 5 (2000): 452-67.
144 Defining the Postcontemporary Moment

and now of artistic experience, in the performativity of the present as an

opportunity to find reality – the real thing – via a pragmatic discipline of
observation and the use of forces, tools and prime materials which lead to
painting, sculpture and performance.”19

Pinto’s crucial observation concerns the “super-fast overtaking of the

present” that we now see occurring globally. Your cell phone is still
functional, so you trade it in for an upgrade. You upgrade your computer
yearly, not because you need to but because you are alerted almost daily
by the computer itself that upgrades are available. This is more than the
60s notion of keeping up with the Joneses; the super-fast overtaking of the
present demands that the contemporary moment be made “retro” as soon
as possible, lest one get caught in the past. As Pinto writes,

“Who among us has not seen, on a small domestic scale, the harmful
effects of technological obsolescence: the hundreds of video cassettes
lovingly collected over the course of the last 20 years are about to pass
their sell-by date and DVDs will not even last that long! Computers go into
the rubbish bins every four years or so, mobile phones every two years or
so. It is easy to imagine this phenomenon on a global scale: the whole
technological civilization suddenly hit by an unprecedented energetic and
ecological rupture. Alarming! The cause can hardly be the technical
potential of ‘History’, but rather the model of so-called post-industrial
society itself. The service economy, great cities and their suburbs would
cave in, and the return to subsistence-based socio-economic models would
end up being imposed upon humanity. Following a catastrophic and violent
interim, the survivors would have to rise up from the ashes to re-embark
upon the long and difficult journey of human development. What is the
starting point? How? With what tools? With what knowledge? With what
convictions?”20

Such concern for how society should re-embark, perhaps even is

embarking already, is echoed elsewhere. John Beverley argues,

“If we are indeed in a new stage of capitalism in which the teleological

horizon of modernity is no longer available . . . then what is required is a
new way of posing the project of the left that would be adequate to the

19
António Cerveira Pinto, “The post-contemporary condition,” http://chroma-kai-
symmetria.blogspot.com/2011/12/post-contemporary-condition.html.
20
Ibid.
 Christopher K. Brooks 145

characteristics of this period. . . . [B]ut also a new way of envisioning the

project . . . in the conditions of globalization and postmodernity.”21

If modernity is unavailable and the postmodern must be re-envisioned in a

world where the present is continuously being overtaken by change, when
does theory pause to offer the “new way” of thinking that Beverley
suggests is needed? Does this explain the appearance of Post-
Contemporary Interventions as the first post 9/11 critical statement?
Similarly, Jose David Saldivar turns his vision to literature, demanding
that theorists “map out a new . . . literature . . . that will subvert traditional
models of contemporary . . . literary history as well.”22 This is becoming
necessary, particularly if a cultural critique offered by the most accessible
of all social observers is taken into account. Scott Van Pelt, perhaps one of
the most learned of Sportcenter’s broadcasters, recently described the
sporting world in postcontemporary terms: “We’ve become a society
where whatever’s happened in the last ten minutes is the most important
thing that ever happened.”23 Time, immediacy, the moment, the here and
now mark the language of postcontemporary discourse. The past is simply
an archive, a deleted email or erased DVR recording, in a world with
immediate news coverage (think 9/11) and no privacy whatsoever. And we
are just starting to realize this. In all recent works on the post 9-11 world
that I have read, the authors suggest that not only postmodernity but the
state of contemporary thought must be re-envisioned and assigned a new
vocabulary. The question becomes, then, what do we call the post state of
contemporary thinking?

Hybrids and the Impulse to Renovate

In Learning from Other Worlds, Darko Suvin asserts that futuristic
literature can prosper best “by grafting new shoots upon the old cognitive
tree” to create a way of thinking “that can recuperate (make sense of)
paradise”24 as capitalist politics have manifested it. So what “new shoots”

21
John Beverly, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory
(Durham: Duke UP, 1999), 3.
22
Jose David Saldivar, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural
Critique, and Literary History (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), 17-19.
23
Scott Van Pelt, SportsCenter Commentary, first broadcast on June 16, 2013,
11:00 EST, by ESPN.
24
Darko Suvin, “With Sober, Estranged Eyes,” afterword to Learning From Other
Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia,
ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 265.
146 Defining the Postcontemporary Moment

emerge in literature? Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road? Jeffrey Eugenides’

Middlesex? How theoretical is this definition of Eugenides’ novel:
“Middlesex defies classification. It is more than a sex/gender story, more
than an immigrant story, more than a coming of age tale.”25 The review at
Amazon.com declares the novel “neither mystical nor supernatural” but
“something else.” Stewart O’Nan (of Atlantic Monthly) declares, “Jeffrey
Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a hybrid.”26 Likewise, Janet
Maslin’s New York Times book review27 of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
describes the novel as embodying the post-apocalyptic saga, the cautionary
tale, the parable, a work which “does not explain what caused the
cataclysm” that keeps the narrative in motion. It is “simultaneously cryptic
and crystal clear,” Maslin writes, a work that should not be read later
because “now is later.” The language of the literary critic echoes that of
the theorist as the overtaking of the present becomes the “later now” of
McCarthy’s novel. Such language focuses on the immediate present with
an eye on what comes “later.” The language of the critics above seems
unhappy, ill-at-ease, with generic words, with the critical idiom, as it
struggles to define art of the new millennium. This is a postcontemporary
concern, the eventual pruning of postmodernism’s buzz words “hybrid,”
“pastiche,” and “graft” that have too long been used to characterize and
describe elements in our postcontemporary society that are new, even
unique. One of the presenters at the 2011 ACLA meeting asserted, “If a
work is entirely original, something new to the critic, then a new language,
perhaps a new literary theory, should emerge to assess it.”28 If critics use
the same descriptive idiom to assess Cormac McCarthy and Jeffrey
Eugenides as they used to critique E.L Doctorow and John Fowles,
language is not keeping up with art. Only a creative and future oriented
theory, I would argue, can revitalize our critical idiom.
Jeffrey Nealon does not call himself a post-contemporist, though much
of the language of his 2012 study Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural
Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism echoes the language of a
postcontemporary thinker. The “just-in-time” compound adjective of his

25
Erin Miller, Review of Middlsex by Jeffrey Eugenides,
http://bestsellers.about.com/od/fictionreviews/gr/middlesex.htm.
26
Stewart O’Nan, Review of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, http://stewart-
onan.com/2008/08/01/middlesex/.
27
Janet Maslin, “The Road Through Hell, Paved With Desperation,” September
25, 2006, review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/books/25masl.html?_r=0.
28
Carmen Derkson, Commentary offered at 2011 American Comparative
Literature Association Conference, Vancouver, Canada, March 30, 2011.
 Christopher K. Brooks 147

title recurs (as expected) throughout his study. Nealon describes the
current economy as a response to multinational capitalism, a response that
is “ongoing, multifarious, and largely experimental.”29 He shortly
thereafter discusses the “postindustrial American economy” with “its just-
in-time (which is to say, all-the-time) delivery of extremely high concept
sensory overload.”30 And he concludes this assessment with the following
statement:

“The future of capitalism, in other words, rests not on the extraction of

profit from commodities or services but on the production of money
directly from money—making money by wagering on an anticipated future
outcome. And the future, it seems, is now.”31

The use of temporal terms and phrases such as “ongoing,” “all-the-

time,” and “the future is now” once again corresponds to Maria’s
“superfast overtaking of the present” as Nealon seems to focus
continuously on the “present-future” or perhaps the “future-present” while
absenting Pinto’s notion of “destroying” the past. Capitalism cannot be
separated from time, though in every sense these are disparate concepts—
but not in discussions of postmodernity. The linguistic markers of
postmodernity, moreover, embody the notion of the hybrid: “time is
money.” That is all ye know on earth . . . as far as contemporary thinking
goes. This is why a postcontemporary ideology is needed: to separate time
from money, perhaps even thought from labor.
Let us consider the aforementioned notion of hybridity. According to
George Yudice, hybridity can be linked to colonialism, then post-
colonialism, as colonized countries merged ideologies with their
colonizers. “Hybridity was at first an affliction to be contained,” writes
Yudice, but later was seen as “becoming the very sign of . . . modernity.”32
Hybrid populations, whether English-speaking Asians or French-speaking
Africans, became the subject of art:

“The popular classes were idealized [in the novels], on the airwaves and
the screen, in part to co-opt their increasing demands . . . against the state
and bourgeois society.”33

29
Jeffrey Nealon, Post-Postmodernism: or, the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time
Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012), 24.
30
Ibid., 25.
31
Ibid., 26.
32
George Yudice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era
(Durham: Duke UP, 2003), 71.
33
Ibid.
148 Defining the Postcontemporary Moment

So the hybrid became conflated with the “common people” and their needs
and now is the postcontemporary poster child—in automobiles, phones
that are cameras that are web-surfers, golf clubs that are neither iron nor
wood, families that are neither nuclear nor heterosexual—the list is
endless. All of the critics embrace this image of merging the salvageable
elements of the pre-9/11 days (democracy in some form; education in
some form; communication in any form) with the ongoing and imminent
changes that technology brings. As late as 2007, Fredric Jameson labored
to assign a name to “this latest moment,” offering “consumer society,
media society, multinational society, postindustrial society,” and “the
society of spectacle” which is characterized by “a repression both of the
past and of any imaginable future, far more intense than in any other social
formation in human history.”34 Jameson also notes that the 90s “offered all
kinds of postmodernist experiences. But when they’re over, they’re
over.”35 So if the “latest moment” is positioned after the postmodern and
postindustrial ideologies whose moments have passed and yet located in a
period that does not and cannot posit a foreseeable future, society is again
left with Pinto’s definition of the postcontemporary—the everfast
overtaking of the present. The –ing affix of “overtaking” provides a
progressive tense that is always progressive, never past or simply “now.”
And because most minds cannot wrap around a continuous present,
contemporary society prefers the hybrid of past and ongoing present. But
what happens when the hybrid becomes the commonplace, the rule? What
happens when a generation does not recognize what “inter-racial” means
because they have never lived in a world with anything but inter-racial
life? Is the decision to hybridize actually a postmodern gesture designed to
renew or renovate itself in its assimilative onward march? Or is it the first
postcontemporary term adapted to describing a world that has been
untethered from its foundational ideologies?
The media offer a fine example of postcontemporary thinking.
Television promised novelty, as TV Guide described it, by offering nearly
two dozen “new” shows in 2011 with “a flock of familiar faces.” TV
renovated Hawaii Five O, recast Wanted, Dead or Alive as Justified and
updated V so that the classic Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” could
be seen by Generation Y as an ongoing series starring actors from The
4400 and Lost, so that instead of watching a truly new series, the naïve
viewer is simply offered the common roster of both themes and actors in
such a way that the continuum seems original. As TV Guide said it, “TV is

34
Jameson, Jameson on Jameson, 15.
35
Ibid., 66.
 Christopher K. Brooks 149

better at creating new stars than bringing back old ones,” yet the thesis of
their essay is that the memory of television viewers longs to be “satiated”
with familiar faces in new settings.36 This is Jameson’s “authentic
modern” morphing even as we view it into the continuous postmodern.
This is the also role of the hybrid, the longing for something novel as long
as it connects to the past, the need for that which links the continuum to
the innovative. We cannot “break” from our past because our teachers and
politicians were shaped by that past and have made it into our present; we
can only re-make (how many more 60s Super Heroes will re-emerge in the
“now-present”?); recast (“This is not your father’s Oldsmobile”); and
retrograde (Wal-Mart is Rolling Back Prices). The latest phone advertises
that it will “save us from our phones.” Best Buy promises to buy back the
“newest thing” when a “newer” one is marketed—so what is the “best
buy” when one feels the weight of not the 60s “planned obsolescence” but
rather of the new millennium’s “immediately obsolete”? Or, as Andy
Rooney complained when opening a new printer box on 60 Minutes,

“I have four computers here in my office. Three of them are useless and
one is broken. They were invented about 20 minutes ago but they're
obsolete already. There they sit, taking up space. They'll be there tomorrow
and a year from tomorrow. I'll never use one of them again but I'll never
throw one out, either.”37

“Invented” becomes “obsolete” in the space of a sentence. Tomorrow and

a “year from tomorrow” are conflated in a Bachelardian notion of whether
the computers should be relegated to the closet or the basement, and
whether utility or obsolescence has any meaning in a disposable society. In
this sense, postcontemporary society cannot discern between “late and
soon” (“later now”; “this latest moment”) because—as other scholars in
this collection will attest—late and soon are situated in their relationship to
the present, which is constantly being overtaken by progress which we
both desire and from which we must be saved. “Sooner or later than
what?” one might ask. If one seeks to answer from the stance of utility—as
long as something is useful, keep it, or as soon as it gives out, trash it—
then why upgrade a functional computer or add apps to a perfectly suitable
cell phone? But why resist them, either, if those in charge of the
technology which shapes our lives insist that we will be more current, life

36
TV Guide, Fall Preview Special Issue, September 11-23, 2012.
37
60 Minutes, “Watching the Border/Revelations from the Campaign/Resurrecting
the Extinct/Andy Rooney,” episode no. 16, season 42, first broadcast January 10,
2010 by CBS, directed by Arthur Bloom and written by Don Hewitt.
150 Defining the Postcontemporary Moment

will be simpler, if we upgrade almost hourly? Upgrade to what? Some

might answer, to a higher level of utility, or is it futility? Why must we, as
that new cell phone advertisement suggests, buy a phone that will save us
from our phones? Doesn’t the Best Buy policy employ the word “newest”
(a superlative) as subordinate to “newer” (a comparative), as the
advertising language admits that which was purchased was retrograded to
passé at the moment of sale? What is “now” for the “this latest moment”?
How does this affect human behavior? Have you heard the term
“elationship” yet, the word “relationship” lacking its opening letter?
People are friended and unfriended in the click of a mouse, are told of the
end of their love affairs by text message, find intimacy in computer chat
rooms, and link their pasts to their presents via Facebook. Nothing is
private in spite of the efforts to undo the Patriot Act, as millions of people
willingly reveal their innermost thoughts and provide detailed accounts of
their most mundane routines in Blogs and Live Chat. António Cerveira
Pinto alerts us to this condition:

“The aesthetic re-evaluation of flesh and mind, as the re-consideration of

the inherent existential rights of photogenic and propositional images, is
already part of this thrilling change.”38

Much of the change is not “thrilling” as much as creative exhibitionism,

the reaction of millions of individuals who, wearied by multiple wars,
financial problems, political stalemates, hunger, anxiety, and various types
of disenfranchisement, have re-created the “me decade” through
technology. On the other hand, the “re-evaluation of flesh and mind” has
brought forth this study, to share progressive and sometimes provocative
insights about the books we read and the world we live in. What has
changed is how we evaluate and research our ideas, and how we use those
ideas to measure progress, to chart utility. And yet many “elationships”
have a single goal: to meet in “the real world.” The internet only goes so
far: the quotidian, aspects of “the flesh,” the world of the five senses that
advertising plays on and that human desire ultimately returns to, cannot be
found so readily in cyberspace. The virtual gives way to the actual. The
bubbles in this world are made mainly of soap. Postmodern discourse has
taken us to this point, where many of us think that something lies beyond
the horizon.
This collection was conceived as a starting point for a discussion of the
way critical thinking might change. I say “might” because many are not
disenchanted with the open-endedness of postmodernity. They are

38
Pinto, Post-contemporary condition (see note 19 ex supra).
 Christopher K. Brooks 151

comfortable with the assurance, the certainty of postmodernity’s assimilative

ability: like the democratic system, it will always be around. Others
believe that we cannot do things in the same fashion today that we did
forty yeas ago: human progress requires change. Scholars sharing ideas is
as old as Plato, the continuum; scholars creating a new way of thinking—
re-evaluating flesh and mind—is happening here today, in an ever-
changing present that you can shape yourself, if you have the will to do so.
This is the myth of progress, the frowned-upon notion, in the eyes of the
postmodernist, of entering a new era: the break; the schism. Are they
actual events or just new chapters in postmodernity’s onward march?
Perhaps we should be cautious, be wary, and retain as much of
postmodernity’s self-assured, self-renewing, self-awareness as we can, for
it provides an always-to-be-blessed platform from which to critique the
world. Perhaps not. . . .
 AFTERWORD

Postcontemporary thought is meant to look forward, so an ironic

afterword is fitting. Earlier in this collection you saw Clara Eisinger and
others, including me, deal with the concept of the hybrid. In my doctoral
studies I read certain plays for a 17th century preliminary exam, one of the
preparatory works being Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Knight of the
Burning Pestle, their effort at merging dramatic forms to create the
tragicomedy. That hybrid could be argued to have inspired the dramedy of
today, typically aired as hour-long television series such as Psych and
Suits, among many, where plotlines move between legal or criminal
matters and comic and romantic elements. Everyday life reflects such
movement between modes, running in academe from hilarious anecdotes
and amusing stories about classroom performances and faculty missteps to
frustrating and downright maddening decisions about tenure and
promotion and grievances. But who claims today to be the protagonist of a
personal dramedy rather than define him- or herself as a mimetic character
whose ups and downs reflect a basic life pattern? That is, dramedy, like
tragicomedy, is a descriptive word for a fictional genre, each invented to
characterize something new. But “hybrid” has been around, according to
the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, more than five centuries and has
not changed greatly from its initial definition, “the offspring of two
different plants or animals.” Are we satisfied with the critical idiom
available to us—which remains almost wholly unchanged from that used
to describe avant-garde works of the early postmodern period over fifty
years ago—that identifies anything “new” as a hybrid? Meanwhile,
creative writers can still find innovative forms of expression (“bromance”
is another, “steampunk” yet another) while critics fall back on a fixed
idiom of descriptive words. I would no longer feel adversarial if I begged
for a useful definition of hybrid at a literary conference, but rather would
prefer to ponder what today is not hybrid? Academics do more work from
home than their offices, so is their residence a domicile or second office or
a hybrid of both? Phones, cars, multi-tasking role-playing (parent, teacher,
administrator, youth coach, etc.), theo-secular, youthfully aging, part-time
this but full-time that persons “making ends meet”—but how many ends in
how many contexts? To wear many hats was once useful to describe
multi-tasking, but with www preceding global search engines, one has to
 Beyond Postmodernism: Onto the Postcontemporary 153

ask which nation’s or culture’s hat is being worn. Does the metaphor cross
oceans? Borders? Disciplines? How many pairs of shoes do you own?
Viva la difference, yes, but when everything comes down to
“undecidable,” something’s got to give. With uncertainty ubiquitous, one
turns to a dependable and now overextended term: hybrid.
When a word becomes a cliché, it loses its critical significance, not
because the word loses meaning altogether, but because when a decade of
television series are all “dramedies,” the idea becomes a formula, a fixed
and uniform process, and can no longer be a “mixture of two diverse
elements,” even if only because life itself is a mixture of elements. Much
of what can be said about bromances and dramedies—and life with its
multi-tasking—is more mimetic than artifice. Moreover, these merged
forms are now the way of the world. Uniformity precludes novelty at
many levels, so just as television has been described as formulaic and
literature as derivative, literary criticism has become routine. All is
founded on postmodernity and enlarges the kingdom with any advances in
thinking—or so the formula goes, has gone, or has been going. I teach
theory, and much of my teaching involves the regurgitation or re-assembly
of what seemed new in the 70s and 80s and which seems, oddly,
“historically useful” now. That is how I would prefer to describe
postmodernity in this second decade of the new millennium: useful, but
not the only game in town. It will take a generation of new scholars, new
doctoral students, and new independent thinkers to make the
postcontemporary age of thinking work. Mixing yellow and red makes
orange, not a hybrid color. Not every meeting of thesis and antithesis
creates synthesis—post-structuralism saw to that. Some of you reading this
see novelty, the creative process, when a new app is created for your
phone; some of you find independent films and eastern authors are
creating narratives that you find unique and original. It is a mixture of
nothing seen before, save that it employs celluloid or the printed word to
communicate. It is time for those who can say that something “is entirely
new to me”—from a new coffee to an alluring new piece of music—to
declare that such an experience is something to be celebrated, not
classified, not claimed. “It is what it is.” If you know someone who thinks
that way, this collection is their call to arms.
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 CONTRIBUTORS

CHRISTOPHER K. BROOKS, Professor of Literature, was trained as a

Renaissance and Neoclassical scholar but has steadily evolved into a
student of critical methods. He has publications on Samuel Johnson,
Oliver Goldsmith, and Samuel Richardson in one area, and on the
American Colonies, Magical Realism, and Doubling in Film in another.
This collection marks his first venture into literary theory.

KEVIN CRYDERMAN has a PhD degree in English from The

University of Rochester, New York. He is currently an English instructor
at Georgia Gwinnett College. Among his publications are articles on
Faizal Deen's poetry collection Land Without Chocolate: A Memoir in
Jouvert, John Edgar Wideman's novel The Cattle Killing in Callaloo and
on Roy Andersson’s film Songs from the Second Floor in Masters of
World Cinema Volume 2. His interests include World and American
Independent Cinema as well as American fiction since World War II.

CLARA EISINGER graduated from Wake Forest University in 2012,

with a Masters degree in English literature, and published “Distortion,
Messianism, and Apocalyptic Time in The Satanic Verses” (Other
Modernities, 2013).

KIMBERLY ENGBER teaches in the English department and directs the

honors program at Wichita State University. Her current research focuses
on the intersection between anthropology and literature that attracted so
many American women writers in the early twentieth century. Many years
ago, she contributed to research in vision science, and she still hopes to
explain how this relates to travel narrative.

EVAN GOTTLIEB is Associate Professor of English at Oregon State

University. He is the author or co-editor of five books, including Walter
Scott and Contemporary Theory (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Romantic
Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750-1830 (Ohio
State University Press, forthcoming 2014). His current project is
entitled Romantic Realities: British Romanticism and Speculative Realism.
 Beyond Postmodernism: Onto the Postcontemporary 171

LISSI ATHANSIOU KRIKELIS was awarded a doctorate in

Comparative Literature from The Graduate Center, City University of
New York, in 2013. Although her dissertation “Postmodern Metafiction
Revisited” conceives of metafiction as a transhistorical phenomenon, it
particularly examines metafiction’s waves in the postmodern era and
beyond. Her academic interests include among others cognitive
narratology, literary theory, pedagogy of literature, and metafiction in
children's literature. Currently she is working on editing a volume entitled
"Metafiction Revistied." She has taught at Hunter College and Rutgers
University.

ROBERT SAMUELS is president of the University Council-American

Federation of Teachers. He teaches writing at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He writes the blog Changing Universities, and he is the
author of several books, including New Media, Cultural Studies, and
Critical Theory after Postmodernity, and Why Public Higher Education
Should Be Free.

JANA VIZMULLER-ZOCCO is Associate Professor of Italian Linguistics

at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her articles on the history of the
Italian language, Italian in Toronto, Italian dialectology, Sicilian language
and literature appeared in various academic journals such as Italiano e
Oltre, Forum Italicum, Quaderni d’Italianistica, Arba Sicula, Linguistics,
Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, Migration Studies, Quaderni
del ‘900,and Lingua italiana d’oggi. She and her colleague have organized
a successful international conference entitled “Social media: Implications
for the University” in May 2013 (http://socmed13.info.yorku.ca/), selected
papers from which will be published in 2014. At present, she is
researching the transformative effects of reading fiction. Her most recent
exploration involves delving into the role of language in transhumanism.
For additional information about the author’s academic activities and
interests, see http://www.yorku.ca/jvzocco/index_course.html
 INDEX

Abu Ghraib, 125, 128 disposable society, 149

affiliative, 23, 24, 25, 27 dramedy, 152
agricultural, 140 egocasting, 88
agroecosystems, 140 elationship, 150
American Transcendentalists, 37 embeddedness, 106, 107, 112
anti-identity, xii, 18, 20 enhancement technologies, 48
anti-intellectualism, xvii, 118, 125 exceptionalist, 29
augmentation, 49, 53, 54, 60 exhaustion theory, xii
automation, 63, 66, 68, 72, 73, 75, extralinguistic, 105
76, 78, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, genetic modification, 47, 50
89, 90 genomic interventions, 60
automodern technologies, 63, 75, graft, 146
83, 84, 85, 89 Habermasianism, 22
automodernism, 70, 75 Hermaphrodite, The, xii, 33, 36, 37,
automodernity, 63, 64, 66, 68, 71, 38, 40, 45, 160, 168
75, 76, 78, 80, 86, 88, 89 heteroglossia, 27
autonomy, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, hybrid, xi, xii, xiii, xv, 2, 5, 18, 146,
72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153
83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, hybridity, 36, 45, 147
136 idealism, 124, 125
binary, x, xiv, xvi, 35, 94, 104, 105 identarian logic, 21, 23, 30
biolinguistics, xiv, 56 identitarian logic, 20
boundless recursivity, 56 immediacy, xviii, 145
brain-computer interfaces, 47 immediately obsolete, 149
bromance, 152 immigrant, 104, 146
capitalism, 25, 60, 66, 123, 135, indeterminism, xi, xv, 2
141, 144, 147 intentionalism, 20, 25
constructivism, 68, 69 intersubjective communication, 77
consumerism, 46, 80, 100, 143 intertextuality, 9
contemporary, xiii intradiegetic, 112
cosmopolitanism, 20, 21 intralinguistic, 105
Cryonics, 51, 154 jouissance, 125
cryptonormative, 30 Lacan, 70, 86, 99, 115, 119, 120,
cyberspace, 79, 150 169
cyborg, 35, 36, 55, 165 Lacanian psychoanalysis, 125, 135
cynical reason, 128 Leftism, 129
deconstructionism, 61, 129 liberalism, 25
despatialized, 41 linguistics, 53, 166, 171
diaspora, 3, 5, 6, 10, 14 logocentricity, 61
 Beyond Postmodernism: Onto the Postcontemporary
Marxism, 20, 25, 125, 137, 161
metafiction, xv, xvi, 92, 93, 102,
106, 110, 111, 113, 171
metafictional, xvi, 92, 93, 102, 104,
105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110,
111, 112
metalepsis, 106, 107, 109
metaleptic, 108
MetaMaus, 92, 93, 102, 103, 111,
112, 167
migrancy, 11, 12
millenarian, 10
mind uploading, 52
mirror theory of selfhood, 70
Mobile Privatization, 76
modern period, 66, 95, 136
modern universal reason, 68, 75
Modernism, 1, 3, 6, 9, 13, 14, 15,
16, 157, 160, 162
modernist, xvi, 3
multicultural relativism, 64
multiculturalism, 19, 20, 64, 65, 66,
78
multiculturalists, xv, 64
narrative capacity, 59, 61
neodymium magnetic implants, 55
neotraditionalism, 23
neural implants, 47
normativity, 19
objectivism, 68
pastiche, 2, 146
PC Castle, 141
People of Paper, The, 92, 93, 102,
103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109,
110, 111, 112, 165
planetary humanism, 21, 22
planned obsolescence, 149
pluralists, 139
poesis, 13
positionality, 19
post post-identity, xii, 20, 21, 25
postcolonial, xi, 1, 5, 6, 9, 14, 15,
16, 108, 134, 135
postcolonialism, 6, 23
postcolonialists, 136
post-contemporaneity, 138, 142
173
postcontemporary, ix, x, xii, xiii,
xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, 34, 44, 135,
137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143,
145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 153
post-contemporary, ix, 137, 140,
142, 143, 144, 161, 164
postcontemporists, ix, xi, 139
post-ethnicity, xii, 18
postgenderism, 36
posthumanism, xiii, 34, 35, 36
posthumanist, xiii, xiv, 34
post-humanist, xiv, 46
post-identity, xi, xii, 18, 19, 20, 21,
23, 25, 28, 30
postindustrial society, 137, 148
postindustrialism, 137
post-millennium metafiction, 93,
113
postmodern, x
postmodern metafiction, 93, 111
postmodern social mediation, 68
postmodernism, ix, x, xii, xiii, xv,
xvi, xvii, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 16, 18, 34,
64, 65, 67, 68, 70, 93, 94, 95, 96,
97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 111,
113, 118, 130, 134, 135, 136,
138, 146
postmodernists, ix, xvii, 8, 130
postmodernity, x, xi, xii, xiii, xv,
xvii, xviii, 8, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65,
66, 67, 69, 89, 93, 134, 135, 136,
138, 139, 145, 147, 150, 153
poststructuralism, 23, 137
post-post identity, xi
post-postmodern, xii
post-postmodernism, xii
post-structuralist, 19
pragmatism, 20, 21, 25
prenatal enhancement, 47
psychological androgyny, xiii, 40
radical enhancement, 48, 51, 53, 59
Radical life extension, 51
religious fundamentalism, 25
renovate, 148
Rushdie, x, xi, 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
11, 12, 14, 15, 154, 165
174 Index

Satanic Verses, The, x, xi, 1, 5, 16, transhumanism, xiv, 46, 48, 50, 58,
17, 158, 165, 170 60, 61, 171
senescence, 50 transhumanist, xiv, 46, 47, 48, 49,
short circuits, 128, 129 50, 53, 54, 58, 59, 60, 61, 160,
singularity, 47, 50, 60, 62 163
social constructivism, 64, 65, 69 universal scientific reason, 71
socialism, 25 universalism, 19, 20, 21, 25, 27, 64,
steampunk, 152 79
structuralism, 61, 65, 97, 153 unrepresentable, 13
subjective unity, 70, 71 utility, ix, 69, 134, 138, 143, 149,
subjectivity, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 75, 150
77, 78 verum factum est, 50
subjectivization, 19 Žižek, xvii, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118,
sublime, 5, 6, 9, 14 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124,
substrate independent minds, 52 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130,
textuality, 97, 101 131, 132, 156, 157, 159, 160,
theory of exhaustion, xii, 19, 20, 23 161, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168,
tragicomedy, 152 169
transcranial magnetic stimulation,
47