Postmodernism

anything, fragments encourage the reader to think about a matter, to imagine diverse ways of engaging with it.

has influenced the entire world at every level and at almost every point. No one is untouched by the activities of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, no one is unaffected by the destruction of the world’s ecosystems by an over-stimulated industrial economy. The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica may have gotten smaller in the last year, but the level of dangerous gasses directly above the hole has recently peaked. Nor is it at all certain that the multiplication of liberal democracies will prevent another world war. It is just as likely that globalization will be regarded as a profound and incessant threat to Islam, especially to its many fundamentalists; that it will be resisted by a new kind of warrior, the international terrorist; and that a badly managed confrontation between the United States and any one of a number of countries will escalate into nuclear war.

Our rough-and-ready idea of postmodern men and women gives us an image of rootless individuals, people who do not trust any sort of linear history. They treat the past as an archive from which they can select items at will, parody them or quote them out of context for a special effect. We think of people who are wholly absorbed in a world of tele-technology and digital information that did not even exist twenty years ago. Could it be that they are living in a world without history?

Desire is no longer something we feel from time to time; it has become the medium in which we live and move and have our being.

Everyday life is the time of repetition. No one has ever had lived experience of the everyday, for our lives are spent in not experiencing it.

In an essay on Michel Leiris that appeared in 1947 he declared that the point of writing is not self-expression but meeting risks that will change the writer. This process of change is far from straightforward: Blanchot insists that the experience literature makes available is essentially deceptive, and that its value is constituted in that. How is literature deceptive? In many ways, but consider this example. A writer might be perfectly sincere when composing a poem and it might show, yet his or her sentiment can end up appearing comic when read by another. (As André Gide sharply noted, all bad literature is made of fine sentiments.) Another writer might be insincere, doing no more than following a convention when composing, yet he or she might be praised for the authenticity of what is offered to the public. In writing, one can lose certainties that seemed to be firmly in place before picking up a pen. Writers frequently tell stories about having learned from their writing. ‘Before I wrote that story, I thought I believed in happy endings,’ a novelist might say, ‘but in following my characters right to the end I realize that I am not as optimistic as I thought I was.’ (In outline, the claim is not a new one: St Augustine testifies in one of his letters that he comes upon new ideas only by writing.) Also, Blanchot thinks, in writing one can discover something that it is impossible ever to lose. One can risk finding oneself placed in relation to that which has no meaning and no world. It is this eerie thought that preoccupied him over his long life, and one that we need to understand. We can best do so by examining his theory of the imaginary.

Doubtless postmodern men and women will still seek meaning and truth, although they will also be aware, uneasily so, that being itself undercuts the possibility of meaning and truth. The outside is not an alternative to being; it is a split in being.

One thing we can retain from his theory and his practice is that postmodern experience is leagued with experiment.

If we follow its etymology we will find ourselves all too quickly in a tangle. ‘Experience’ derives from the Latin experiri, which means ‘to test’ or ‘to try’. The prefix ex means ‘out of’ or ‘away from’. Our word ‘experience’ would therefore signify something like ‘what we gain from trying or testing something’. We can go into more detail, though. The radical of the Latin word is periri, which can also be found in periculum, ‘danger’ or ‘peril’. Going back beyond Latin to Greek, we find peras, ‘limit’, pera, ‘beyond’ and peirô, ‘to cross’. It begins to look as though our word ‘experience’ draws from both danger and crossing over; and since crossing a border often involves some peril the two sources are not at odds with one another. So the word ‘experience’ perhaps means having come out of danger, having survived the risk of peril.

Kant distinguished analytic and synthetic judgments, that is, he drew a line between those statements that are true by virtue of their form and those that are not. A synthetic statement tells us something because it joins together two unrelated items (‘Mary Jane Smith is a good pianist’), while an analytic statement is logically true – or can be translated into a logical truth – and gives us no information at all (‘Mary Jane Smith is female’).