By Jake Bellone

In order to be able to create a space where we can be free of postmodernism, we’ll have to bury it. This means both an understanding of postmodernism (which will never be complete) as well as an understanding of what necessarily comes after it.

One of the easiest, though perhaps the most important place to attack postmodernism is on the issue of its relativism. In the absence or lack of any meta-narrative, of any cohesive agent which binds all aspects of a society (God, Reason), there is generally understood a complete relativism, a sort of «Rien n’interdit, tout est permis». If there is no force or agent to appeal to in regards to universality, then the support of universality disappears, and we are left in a fundamental lack of Meaning. From any given Event, all interpretations present themselves as having an equal relationship to truth. There is the idea that any truth is valid (qua Truth). The situation presents itself in a particular relationship; we are inclined to feel that we are immersed in the Real, and each of us must draw a (ultimately subjective) notion or interpretation.

What distinguishes the intellectual/cultural strain of postmodernism to its (supra-modern) heir is the understanding of the relationship that we are immersed in subjective notions, and it is from this what we must be able to determine the Real, to find the kernel of the Real that exists among this multitude of opinions and subjective interpretations. The true danger is not to mistake the false for the true, but to make the mistake of interpreting the true as false. Postmodern relativism mistakes an event for having a multitude of truths, but it is unable to determine what is ultimately Real in any given event. Relativism gives each individual an equal relationship to truth, but this only further problematizes reality. The Holocaust did not happen (in regards) to us, and not to Others. The Holocaust fully existed as the Real. The sacrifice for being able to face the Real is being able to face it in all its revolting and violent features, even as ultimately repulsive and vulgar.

This drives the point home that psychoanalysis is not actually so much internal, that is, discovering how the world is a projection of internal (sometimes repressed) thoughts and impulses. Psychoanalysis is interested in the external, that is, the relationship and proximity of the individual to the Real, as traumatic as the Real may be. For this reason cutting can be determined to be a symptom of the modern, of a too-great distance between the subject of the Real and the Real itself. Cutters enjoy the practice of it, and often feel relieved when they see blood dripping down their arm. We can interpret that this type of situation actually brings the subject closer to the Real. It is best read symptomatically.

At the same time, the notion that emerges from postmodernism that nothing can really be unbiased or objective still retains a kernel of truth in it as well. We are never in a position of objectivity. There will never be such thing as “unbiased” news, since objectivity rests on a distance and spontaneity that is only achievable for a god. We can never be objective in relation to the Real since we are always internal to it, we are always immersed. There can be no objectivity precisely because we are contingent, precisely because we are in-the-world.  Nonetheless we can maintain a minimal difference to noumenal/objective reality. 

The Kantian distinction must be clear.  There is the noumena, the unachievable Thing, the unachievable and undigestible Real, and then there is the Appearance of the noumena.  While we can never achieve the thing-in-itself, nonetheless there is a way reality really appears to us.  When we speak of reality we are talking about a symbolically-mediated distance to the Real.  This Appearance is the minimal distance toward the Real.  So all this talk of relativism and reality as a discursive function holds no weight.  There is a reality out there.

What ultimately distinguishes modernism and postmodernism is more its form of narration. Modernism tends to focus on mythic stories, of the protagonist overcoming obstacles in order to achieve greatness, and become great. Postmodernism tends to draw this “great and mythic figure” into seemingly banal, common, quotidian existence.

Postmodernism is not truly reducible to a certain period of time, it cannot be reduced to a starting-point and ending point. It is more accurately determinable in events. Since the loss of religion as the cohesive agent, and the placing of Reason as the center (whereby all aspects of social, political, and economic life retain their autonomy) there occur throughout time certain ruptures that break the flow of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche is an example, as well as Joyce, all the way through Houllebecq and Sartre. What we can determine from these ruptures is the status of postmodernism as the myth of modernism. Sartre’s «La Nausée» expresses an unexplainable feeling of nausea, but this nausea appears as a symptom of the modern. Postmodernism is what allows the symptoms of modernism to come to light.

Perceived as an event or rupture we can determine two good examples (among others) to illustrate postmodernism as symptom and myth. The Holocaust was the event capable of producing precisely what this means as a, or perhaps the myth of modernity. The methodology undertaken by the Nazis was one of a cold and calculating rationality deprived of sensibility. It was a cruelly logical act. It required the careful coordination of technology in combination with this (bureaucratic) rationality in order undertake the act itself. The Holocaust is a perfect example of the conditions of the Enlightenment. Moreover, it is a consequence of trying to bind all aspects of social, economic, and political life within one overarching narrative, in this case, the narrative of the Volk. The form of the bureaucracy itself is a natural outcome and outgrowth of the preoccupation with Reason beyond all sensibility coupled with technology.

Another example is the Paris riots of May 1968. In many ways the events of 1968, precisely its strongest and more radical tendencies (the Situationist International) were interested in the realization of modern poetry, a full-scale assault on poetry and everyday life. It would incorrect to understand these riots and the actions, ideas, and writings of the Situationist International and group of students known as les enrages as a mere symptom of modernism. A far more interesting assessment would be, if capitalism carried the seeds of its own destruction, then the Situationist International would be the flowering result of these seeds.

Nonetheless, despite nearly having capitalism on its knees through country-wide factory occupations, through the distribution of commodities deprived of their commodity status (that is, freely), and despite the near-complete mobilization of Paris against the police (in their Marxian distinction as “guard-dogs” of the commodity), they were no match for a purely police/military resistance. On the verge of revolution, it is the failure of this revolution (or an attempt at a renaissance of the Enlightenment) that brings to bare a Fukuyama-esque “spaghetti postmodernism” myth of the “end of history,” that all that is left is merely what it is. And there can be no questioning of whatever form this “(w)hole” takes when there is no whole, when all there is, is a multitude of perceptions devoid of anything real.

Therein, in an era of post-postmodernity, it makes sense to make use of the Hegelian/Leninian notion of repetition. It is against to resuscitate repetition as against the Huntingtonian/Fukuyaman myth of the “end of history.”

There is also a certain relationship between Kierkegaard and Kafka in relation to postmodernism, a form of singular expression (which allows us to speak of the becoming-Kafka of Kierkegaard and the becoming-Kierkegaard of Kafka). In Kafka’s short story The Hunger Artist we encounter a man who is on display at a form of fair or circus, and the people come to gawk at this man as he continues to starve himself slowly. What is the unique feature about this man is that he is not starving, and it is not that he refuses to eat, but that he simply does not, and can’t find himself able to eat.

“I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “But we do admire it,” said the supervisor obligingly. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. “Well then, we don’t admire it,” said the supervisor, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I had to fast. I can’t do anything else,” said the hunger artist. “Just look at you,” said the supervisor, “why can’t you do anything else?” “Because” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and, with his lips pursed as if for a kiss, speaking right into the supervisor’s ear so that he wouldn’t miss anything, “because I couldn’t find a food which I enjoyed. If I had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else.”

This passage should be read through Kierkegaard, in regards to specifically his The Present Age. Here Kierkegaard says, rather simply, “Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.” This, as well as cutting and an unnamable nausea, are read as symptoms of modernity. For Kierkegaard/Kafka, it is precisely the wealth of a late capitalist society, and despite this affluence, which is unable to fill a certain Void or Lack within the subject. It is this inability to fill this Void which is the myth of modernity. This example reveals the true symptom of modernity qua late capitalism.
           
What does this mean for supra-modernity? It is here that I wish to make use of the idea of Adorno’s that one should be careful not to be too clever, and oftentimes not clever at all. What I would stress, as someone inextricably taken up with what is post-postmodern (supra-modern), is a focus on experimentation and repetition. I would like to stress that the revolution will be repeated. I did not create the supra-modern, I am not the author of the supra-modern, I am not going to say what will be, what is, but as someone who is inseparable from the time and space which I occupy, these are my ideas. I’m interested to gather the tools necessary as an agent of history, as we are all agents of history, in creating the Act, in creating the Event.
           
To become sovereign, autonomous agents of history, as global subjects, all that’s important is that we properly digest postmodernism, with our choosy tongues, to take and leave whatever we want, and henceforward experiment with just such these tools. This is the lesson of the postmodern. To not except everything, not to say Yes to everything, not to eat everything, as pigs do, not to bare the weight of everything because we wish to bring everything, not to be the beast of burden (the camel), and neither do I wish to say No to everything, to reject everything, to negate everything (the lion), to always throw the baby out with the bathwater. I don’t know what the supra-modern is, but I can only say what it is no longer.