.
Loren Gold­ner was an angry is­land of Marxi­an cri­tique sur­roun­ded in the 1980s and 1990s by a sea of post­struc­tur­al­ist and post­co­lo­ni­al hogshit. Even os­tens­ibly Marx­ist parties like the ISO in­tern­al­ized a lot of the re­lat­iv­ist garbage of this peri­od, however much they might claim to re­ject it.

I think Gold­ner is a bit un­fair in lump­ing the Frank­furt School in with all the oth­er stuff he dis­cusses in this es­say, but in terms of its re­cep­tion by the Anglo­phone academy he has a point. One might quibble with Gold­ner’s char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of this or that thinker, or some of his gen­er­al­iz­a­tions, but this is de­lib­er­ate and cal­cu­lated for po­lem­ic­al ef­fect.

This es­say was ori­gin­ally pub­lished in 2001, and can be read over at his web­site. I’ve taken the liberty of cor­rect­ing the vari­ous mis­spellings that ap­pear in it, and ad­ded first names of au­thors who might oth­er­wise seem a bit ob­scure. You should also check out his es­say on “The Uni­ver­sal­ity of Marx” re­pos­ted by Com­in Situ a few months back, an in­cis­ive cri­tique of Ed­ward Said and Samir Amin.

Deconstruction and deindustrialization
Ontological “difference” and the neoliberal war
on the social

Loren Goldner
Queequeg Press
January 2001
.
.
.

Art without know­ledge is noth­ing.
[Ars sine sci­en­tia ni­hil.]

— Jean Mignot

.
It was 1971. We were in our early twen­ties and we were mad. After the seem­ing pre­lude to apo­ca­lypse we had just lived through, who, at the time, would have be­lieved that we were at the be­gin­ning of three dec­ades (and count­ing) in which, in the U.S. at least, mass move­ments would all but dis­ap­pear from the streets? Even today, the evan­es­cence of the world-wide mood of 1968 seems slightly in­cred­ible. The funk of 1971 turned Wordsworth on his head: “Ter­rible in that sun­set to be alive, but to be young was hell it­self.”

The “six­ties,” in their pos­it­ive im­pulse, were over. In the U.S., the mass move­ment in the streets of 1965 to 1969 was quickly turn­ing co­matose. The ul­tra-Sta­lin­ist Pro­gress­ive Labor Party cap­tured SDS (Stu­dents for a Demo­crat­ic So­ci­ety), but cap­tured only a corpse made up only of its own rap­idly-dwind­ling mem­bers. The stock mar­ket crashed, Penn Cent­ral went bank­rupt, and the fin­an­cial mar­kets seized up in a gen­er­al li­quid­ity crisis (it would not be the last). Not many people of the 1960s New Left paid much at­ten­tion to these eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ments at the time, and few­er still un­der­stood that they signaled the end of the post­war boom. But a sense of the end of something was in the air. The Decem­ber 1969 Alta­mont con­cert of the Rolling Stones had turned ugly, as the Hell’s An­gels guard­ing the band­stand had beaten a young black man to death with pool cues. The Chica­go po­lice murdered Black Pan­ther Fred Hamp­ton in his sleep. Charles Man­son’s col­lect­ive had earli­er murdered preg­nant act­ress Shar­on Tate and oth­er party­go­ers in the Hol­ly­wood hills, leav­ing a fork in Tate’s stom­ach, and the Weather­men made the fork in­to a sym­bol of struggle at their next con­fer­ence. Some Weather­men, in turn, blew them­selves up in a Green­wich Vil­lage pent­house, though Ber­nad­ine Dohrn and the oth­ers would con­tin­ue to plant more bombs and to put out their de­men­ted mani­fes­tos for some time af­ter­ward. The postal work­ers struck mil­it­antly and the gov­ern­ment sent the Na­tion­al Guard — fu­tilely — to de­liv­er the mail be­fore cav­ing to the strike. Nix­on and the U.S. mil­it­ary in­vaded Cam­bod­ia; the Team­sters wild­cat­ted in Clev­e­land and else­where; the Na­tion­al Guard unit which had con­fron­ted the Team­sters went on to Kent State with little sleep and killed four anti-war stu­dents. A na­tion­al stu­dent strike fol­lowed, but it was (sig­ni­fic­antly) taken over in many places, for the first time in years, by left-lib­er­als who tried to turn its en­ergy to lib­er­al Demo­crat­ic polit­ics for the fall 1970 elec­tions. Huey New­ton, head of the Black Pan­ther Party (BPP), was re­leased from jail in sum­mer 1970, an­noun­cing at the en­su­ing press con­fer­ence his in­ten­tion to “lead the struggle of the people to a vic­tori­ous con­clu­sion,” ap­par­ently un­aware (after serving 2½ years on man­slaughter charges for killing an Oak­land cop) that the “struggle of the people” in the U.S. was, for the fore­see­able fu­ture, fold­ing up the tent. The sleaze and rot of the end of the six­ties were not a pretty sight: Tim Leary, the former P.T. Barnum of LSD, held pris­on­er by the break­away Eldridge Cleav­er fac­tion of the BPP in Al­gi­ers; the burnt-out meth freaks scroun­ging spare change; the grim de­term­in­a­tion, in dour New Left mi­lieus, to “smash” everything bour­geois.

More dif­fusely but with more of a fu­ture, at least in the pro­fes­sion­al middle classes, the “new so­cial move­ments” were gath­er­ing mo­mentum: wo­men re­jec­ted their second-class roles every­where in so­ci­ety, in­clud­ing in the 1960s New Left; gays rode the mo­mentum of the 1969 Stone­wall ri­ots; an im­port­ant minor­ity of blacks and Lati­nos moved in­to the middle class through af­firm­at­ive ac­tion pro­grams, the Club of Rome re­port on Lim­its to Growth and the Rock­e­feller-backed Zero Pop­u­la­tion Growth gave the eco­logy and en­vir­on­ment­al move­ments (and more dif­fusely, a good part of so­ci­ety) the Malthu­s­i­an agenda they have nev­er really shaken off.

The fol­low­ing es­says were writ­ten over more than two dec­ades, yet they form a con­tinu­ous whole, even if it is one that only fully emerged over time. They were writ­ten “against the grain” of much of the ideo­logy of the past fifty years, above all in its left and far left guises, that might be sum­mar­ized with the term “middle-class rad­ic­al­ism.” While much of middle-class rad­ic­al­ism may have seemed, over the course of the 20th cen­tury, to over­lap with the Marxi­an project of com­mun­ism, they are as ul­ti­mately op­posed as Max Stirner and Mikhail Bak­un­in on one hand and Karl Marx and Rosa Lux­em­burg on the oth­er. One might use the Hegel­i­an term “neg­a­tion of the neg­a­tion” to de­scribe the former and the Feuerba­chi­an term “self-sub­sist­ing pos­it­ive” to de­scribe the lat­ter. The “fault line” between one and the oth­er is pre­cisely Marx’s re­lo­ca­tion of the “cre­at­ive act of trans­form­a­tion” with­in man’s re­la­tion­ship to nature, what the “Theses on Feuerbach” call sinn­liche umwälzende Tätigkeit or “sen­su­ous trans­form­at­ive activ­ity.” The fault line is moreover between Hegel’s view of nature as the realm of “re­pe­ti­tion,” as “bor­ing,” and Marx’s view of hu­man his­tory, and man’s his­tory in the trans­form­a­tion of nature, as the trans­form­a­tion of the laws of nature them­selves in his cri­tique of Malthus’ the­ory of pop­u­la­tion. In the lat­ter view, nature and nat­ur­al laws them­selves be­come his­tor­ic­al. “An an­im­al only pro­duces its own nature,” Marx wrote in 1844, “but hu­man­ity re­pro­duces all of nature.” An an­im­al is a tool; a hu­man be­ing uses tools. Hegel epi­tom­ized the “state civil ser­vant” view of his­tory, with his idea that the Prus­si­an mon­arch and his bur­eau­crats per­formed uni­ver­sal labor, where­as Marx pre­cisely trans­poses the idea of uni­ver­sal labor, i.e. cre­ativ­ity, to man’s sen­su­ous activ­ity with­in nature, an ex­ten­sion of nat­ur­al his­tory. This “uni­ver­sal labor” of course ex­ists only frag­ment­ar­ily and ab­stractly with­in cap­it­al­ism, scattered among the dif­fer­ent parts of the (pro­duct­ive) work­ing class, and some parts of the sci­entif­ic and tech­nic­al strata. But these frag­ments, along with oth­ers from in­tel­lec­tu­al and cul­tur­al life, are in­dis­pens­able fu­ture parts of a fu­ture activ­ity “as all-sided in its pro­duc­tion as in its con­sump­tion” which Marx, in the Grundrisse, sees as the su­per­ses­sion of the cap­it­al­ist work/ leis­ure an­ti­nomy in com­mun­ism.

Fol­low­ing in the same vein, one might just as suc­cinctly coun­ter­pose middle-class rad­ic­al­ism and Marxi­an so­cial­ism as fol­lows: middle-class rad­ic­al­ism con­ceives of free­dom as “trans­gres­sion,” as the break­ing of laws, the “re­fus­al of all con­straints,” as the Situ­ation­ist In­ter­na­tion­al put it more than thirty years ago, where­as the Marxi­an project of com­mun­ism con­ceives of free­dom as the prac­tic­al solu­tion of a prob­lem­at­ic which evolved the­or­et­ic­ally from Spinoza and Leib­n­iz to Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach as the trans­form­a­tion of laws, up to and in­clud­ing the phys­ic­al laws of the uni­verse, man’s unique “Pro­methean” ca­pa­city. More than 150 years ago, Marx, in his cri­tique of the middle-class rad­ic­al­ism of the Young Hegel­i­ans, said that for Bauer, Hess, and Stirner the sci­ence, tech­no­logy, and hu­man his­tory of prac­tic­al activ­ity in nature was only “mass, mere mass,” to use the jar­gon of the day. For most of the West­ern left, far left, and ul­traleft which emerged from the 1960s, these phe­nom­ena are shown the door with the up­dated (and es­sen­tially Weberi­an) Frank­furt School man­tra “dom­in­a­tion, mere dom­in­a­tion.” For the middle-class rad­ic­al, “neg­a­tion of the neg­a­tion” view, the prob­lems are “hier­archy,” “au­thor­ity,” “dom­in­a­tion,” and “power”; for the Marxi­an com­mun­ist view, the prob­lems are the project of the ab­ol­i­tion of value, com­mod­ity pro­duc­tion, wage labor, and the pro­let­ari­at (the lat­ter be­ing the com­mod­ity form of labor power with­in cap­it­al­ism). From these lat­ter the “neg­a­tion of the neg­a­tion” prob­lem­at­ic is en­tirely re­cast, re­formed and su­per­seded, and its heavy over­lay of bour­geois ideo­logy — free­dom con­ceived without the trans­form­a­tion of ne­ces­sity — dis­carded.

What is truly ap­palling today in large swaths of the left and far-left in the West is the will­ful il­lit­er­acy in the cri­tique of polit­ic­al eco­nomy. Per­haps even more ap­palling, and closely re­lated, is the will­ful il­lit­er­acy, bore­dom and hos­til­ity where sci­ence and nature are con­cerned. It is cer­tainly true that the “cri­tique of polit­ic­al eco­nomy” can some­times be al­most as bor­ing as polit­ic­al eco­nomy it­self, bet­ter known today un­der its still more ideo­lo­gic­ally con­tem­por­ary name of “eco­nom­ics.” We re­call Marx writ­ing to En­gels (in 1857!) say­ing that he hoped to have done with the “eco­nom­ic shit” with­in a year or two. I my­self have stud­ied “eco­nom­ic ques­tions” for years, and have also spent years in re­cov­ery from the no­vo­cained, ashes-in-the mouth feel­ing brought on by ex­cess­ive ex­pos­ure to the “dis­mal sci­ence” — or even to its cri­tique.

But this is something rather dif­fer­ent than a cer­tain mood of the past thirty-five years, a mood whose cul­min­a­tion to date is the post­mod­ern, “cul­tur­al stud­ies” scene that has filled up book­stores with its ni­hil­ist pun­ning, its “white males nev­er did any­thing but rape, pil­lage, and loot” the­ory of his­tory, and its ig­nor­ant “everything and every­one is tain­ted” pro­jec­tions onto everything and every­one in some pot­ted no­tion of the West­ern “tra­di­tion.” This is the world view of de­mor­al­ized up­per middle-class people en­sconced in fash­ion­able uni­versit­ies, largely ig­nor­ant of the real his­tory of the fail­ure (to date) of the com­mun­ist project for a high­er or­gan­iz­a­tion of so­ci­ety, as­sum­ing that the his­tor­ic­al and in­tel­lec­tu­al back­wa­ter en­gulf­ing them is the fi­nal product of hu­man his­tory.

All this can be cri­tiqued and re­jec­ted on its own terms. It goes hand-in-hand with an ever-linger­ing “mood” which as­serts that there was nev­er any­thing his­tor­ic­ally pro­gress­ive about cap­it­al­ism, a mood so per­vas­ive that it does not even both­er to ar­gue the case, since it re­jects out of hand the idea of pro­gress — lin­ear, non-lin­ear, or oth­er­wise — and there­fore the ques­tion is fore­closed be­fore it even comes up. Once the idea of an or­gan­iz­a­tion of so­ci­ety su­per­i­or to cap­it­al­ism is re­pu­di­ated, cap­it­al­ism it­self ap­pears to the post­mod­ern­ists as un­prob­lem­at­ic, just as it is to the rest of bour­geois ideo­logy. While some post­mod­ern­ists might stop short (though God knows why) of one French Heide­g­geri­an’s call to “bring the in­hu­man in­to the com­mons” [don­ner droit de cit(c) a l’in­hu­main], their un­der­ly­ing world out­look eas­ily moves to­ward the same re­pu­di­ation of the tired word “hu­man­ism.” This coun­ter­pos­i­tion sur­faced in the 1987-1988 Heide­g­ger and De Man con­tro­ver­sies in such for­mu­la­tions as “Is Nazism a Hu­man­ism?” [Le Nazisme est-il un Hu­man­isme?] The ar­gu­ment was as fol­lows. Hu­man­ism was the West­ern meta­phys­ic of the “sub­ject,” cul­min­at­ing in Hegel and re­shaped by Marx. Trapped in and con­sti­tuted by the meta­phys­ics of “pres­ence,” the re­duc­tion of everything to a “rep­res­ent­a­tion” (im­age), hu­man­ism was the ideo­logy of the sub­jec­tion — the PoMos would of course write (sub­ject)ion — of the en­tire earth to “rep­res­ent­a­tion,” in what Heide­g­ger called the world­wide dom­in­a­tion of “tech­no­lo­gic­al ni­hil­ism.” Ni­et­z­sche had already ar­rived at im­port­ant an­ti­cip­a­tions of this ana­lys­is. For a cer­tain, “post-1945” (!) Heide­g­ger, Nazism had cul­min­ated this drive to “tech­no­lo­gic­al ni­hil­ism.” (When he was a Nazi, up to 1945, Heide­g­ger had gamely ar­gued that lib­er­al cap­it­al­ism was the cul­min­a­tion of “tech­no­lo­gic­al ni­hil­ism.”) The French Heide­g­geri­ans thus ar­gued that Nazism was a hu­man­ism in its drive to com­plete West­ern “tech­no­lo­gic­al ni­hil­ism,” and that the ap­par­ently Nazi Heide­g­ger, by at­tempt­ing to “de­con­struct” hu­man­ism, was thereby “sub­vert­ing” Nazism. Mean­while, of course, the op­pon­ents of Nazism, of whatever polit­ic­al stripe, were trapped in “hu­man­ism” and there­fore trapped on Nazism’s ter­rain, sim­il­arly fa­cil­it­at­ing the world­wide vic­tory of “tech­no­lo­gic­al ni­hil­ism.” One could pre­sum­ably count an old hu­man­ist such as Lux­em­burg (had she not been murdered in 1919 by proto-Nazis, abet­ted by So­cial Demo­crats) as someone else con­fusedly trapped in “tech­no­lo­gic­al ni­hil­ism,” hav­ing died a bit too early to ap­pre­ci­ate Heide­g­ger as the real op­pon­ent of Nazism.

It is im­port­ant, in passing, to try to re­con­struct the mood of deep de­com­pres­sion throughout the ad­vanced cap­it­al­ist world, ca. 1972, to un­der­stand how things came to their cur­rent state.

One fun­da­ment­al shift that has been al­most totally for­got­ten today is the dis­ap­pear­ance of the cli­mate as­so­ci­ated, for bet­ter or for worse, with the word “ex­ist­en­tial­ism” that reigned from the early 1940s to ca. 1965. This mood was ar­tic­u­lated in the works of au­thors who have for the most part faded away: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Ni­et­z­sche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Al­bert Camus, Maurice Mer­leau-Ponty, Feodor Dosto­evsky, Mar­tin Heide­g­ger, Karl Jaspers, Miguel de Un­amuno, Jacques Mari­tain. (Why only Ni­et­z­sche and Heide­g­ger are still widely read today, out of all these fig­ures, will be­come clear in a mo­ment.) “Ex­ist­en­tial­ism” seemed, in those years, to over­lap, or be on a con­tinuum with vari­ous con­tem­por­ary “av­ant-gardes” of the 1945-1965 peri­od, in­clud­ing the Amer­ic­an beats, the Brit­ish “Angry Young Men,” Par­is Lat­in Quarter cel­lar night clubs, be­bop, and free jazz, seri­al mu­sic, the films of dir­ect­ors such as Ing­mar Berg­man, Michelan­gelo Ant­o­nioni, Jean-Luc God­ard, the theat­er of Har­old Pinter, Samuel Beck­ett, and Eugène Ion­esco. The pop­ular­ized watch­words of “ex­ist­en­tial­ism” were des­pair, Angst, death, des­pair, naus­ea, ab­surdity, mean­ing­less­ness, ali­en­a­tion. The fu­ture of the plan­et, every­where, seemed to be high mod­ern­ist tech­no­cracy, ma­ter­i­al­ized in the aus­tere ar­chi­tec­ture of the in­ter­na­tion­al style that had tri­umphed in the 1930s and in the gi­ant in­dus­tri­al and in­fra­struc­tur­al projects that littered the “so­cial­ist” bloc or the Third World (steel mills, dams, en­tire cit­ies like Oscar Niemey­er’s Bra­sil­ia or his equally sin­is­ter French Com­mun­ist Party headquar­ters in Par­is), and but­tressed by the eco­nom­ic myth of the “af­flu­ent so­ci­ety,” “built-in sta­bil­izers,” and de­pres­sion-proof state-guided eco­nom­ic policies. Ex­ist­en­tial­ism caught the self-in­dul­gent cli­mate of the middle classes in the West which took this trend as a bed­rock per­man­ent as­sump­tion, and ex­pressed the at­ti­tude of the em­battled, lonely in­di­vidu­al, for whom col­lect­ive ac­tion either did not ex­ist or smelled too strongly of 1930s Sta­lin­ist pop-front­ism.

Symp­to­mat­ic of polit­ic­al thought out­side the main­stream, in those years, (when people of the “ex­ist­en­tial­ist” per­sua­sion on oc­ca­sion turned their thoughts, fleet­ingly, to polit­ics) was the de­bate over wheth­er the dysto­pia of George Or­well’s 1984 or Al­dous Hux­ley’s Brave New World best cap­tured the fu­ture.

The second half of the 1960s ba­sic­ally swept away this mood, but in con­fus­ing and con­flict­ing ways. The world­wide middle-class New Left def­in­itely had an “ex­ist­en­tial­ist” di­men­sion to it. There was every­where the feel­ing that the cul­tur­al re­volt of the pre­vi­ous twenty to twenty-five years (be­gin­ning, at least in the U.S., in the early forties with fig­ures such as Jack Ker­ou­ac, Al­lan Gins­berg, Neal Cas­sady, and Wil­li­am S. Bur­roughs) some­how in­ef­fably blen­ded in­to the mass move­ments in the streets after 1965. (“We dug the first hole for today’s un­der­ground,” as one aging beat put in 1971. “Mod­ern­ism in the streets” was Daniel Bell’s phrase.) 20,000 in­di­vidu­als wandered around open-air war­rens of per­petu­al ad­oles­cence such as Berke­ley, Cali­for­nia, each ima­gin­ing him- or her­self to be Her­mann Hesse’s Step­pen­wolf. All of this con­tin­ued up to its par­oxysm ca. 1969 to the con­sti­tu­tion of the army of “100,000 Vil­lons,” as the crotchety Saul Bel­low called it.

By 1971, it was clear that this whole cul­ture of the pre­vi­ous thirty years was fad­ing away. In New Left bas­tions such as Berke­ley, people who only a year or two be­fore had wanted to be “pro­fes­sion­al re­volu­tion­ar­ies” were now scram­bling to be just “pro­fes­sion­als”: law­yers, doc­tors, aca­dem­ics, but of course in “an en­tirely new way.”

It was in­to this so­cial and cul­tur­al cli­mate of de­com­pres­sion of middle-class rad­ic­al­ism that the “new Ni­et­z­sche” and the “late Heide­g­ger,” fol­lowed hard by Michel Fou­cault and Jacques Der­rida, in­tro­duced a whole new turn, as epochal as any­thing of the pre­vi­ous three dec­ades, lay­ing the found­a­tion for what would be­come “post­mod­ern­ism” (we had also not yet heard words like “yup­pie” or “gentri­fic­a­tion”). This “new Ni­et­z­sche” and “late Heide­g­ger” emerged from al­most all the oth­er “ex­ist­en­tial­ist” dross of the 1945-1970 peri­od with a tre­mend­ous fu­ture be­fore them. For­got­ten were the ex­ist­en­tial­ist watch­words and in­di­vidu­al prob­lem­at­ics of des­pair, Angst, and dread, so ob­vi­ously su­per­seded in the eu­phor­ia of the re­turn of the re­volu­tion in 1968. And be­cause the 1973 oil crisis and the 1973-1975 world re­ces­sion had not yet happened (put­ting paid to all the eco­nom­ic myths of the pre­vi­ous three dec­ades, from the lib­er­als’ “af­flu­ent so­ci­ety” to the Situ­ation­ists’ “cy­ber­net­ic wel­fare state”) this emer­gence took place when it ap­peared to many that the battle was still against “tech­no­cracy,” “con­sumer ter­ror,” or the “ad­min­istered world.” Chaos, or its threat, had not yet be­come the rul­ing ideo­logy; it was rather still the specter of ho­ri­zons of ce­ment, Le Cor­busier’s béton brut, and tree­less vis­tas of high-rise apart­ments and of­fice build­ings, bump­er-to-bump­er free­way com­mutes, the quiet om­ni­present hum of elec­tron­ic devices, deep mono­tony and bore­dom that haunted middle-class ima­gin­a­tions. We were not “re­mem­ber­ing” the fu­tures of Le­ban­on, Somalia, Ethiopia, An­gola, Mozam­bi­que, Rwanda, Si­erra Le­one, Liber­ia, Chechnya, Afgh­anistan, the Ir­an-Ir­aq war, ex-Yugoslavia, the South Bronx or south cent­ral Los Angeles, but rather the end­less pal­lid chalky sun and wispy clouds of the Mallarméan sky open­ing in­to an etern­al empty fu­ture, the “en­tro­po­logy” that Claude Lévi-Strauss evoked at the end of Tristes Tro­piques.

This Mallarméan sky temp­ted some people to look back, through the eyes of Ni­et­z­sche’s and Heide­g­ger’s in­ter­pret­a­tions of the pre-So­crat­ics, to ar­cha­ic Greece, to where it seemed ἀλήθεια [dis­closed­ness] had be­gun its de­vol­u­tion in­to ver­itas [ver­ity or truth], where Sein [Be­ing] had de­volved in­to das Seiende [en­tity], when “West­ern meta­phys­ics,” with Par­men­ides and Zeno, had “in­ter­preted” Be­ing as “pres­ence,” as rep­res­ent­a­tion, and had be­gun its ca­reer of world con­quest as the Geschick [“des­tiny” or “sense of real­ity”] of the West. None of us, then, had ever giv­en a thought to an­cient Egypt, or an­cient Is­rael, or to Ir­an, or Is­lam­ic Spain as im­port­ant sources of our world; we lived in the era of the “reign of tech­nique,” and little pri­or to a pot­ted, pos­it­iv­ist­ic in­ter­pret­a­tion of the sci­entif­ic re­volu­tion and a Voltaire­an view of the eight­eenth cen­tury seemed of any real im­port­ance; if we ever thought about the Renais­sance and Ref­or­ma­tion of the 16th and 17th cen­tur­ies, it was only as re­spect­ive proto-ra­tion­al­ist mo­ments of sec­u­lar “pa­gan re­viv­al” and Max Weber’s Prot­est­ant Eth­ic. We looked to an­cient Greece and its philo­sophy — the fall in­to the in­ter­pret­a­tion of Be­ing as “pres­ence” and the ori­gins of meta­phys­ics — mainly as a dis­tant pre­curs­or of the tech­no­crat­ic, ad­min­istered world. Civil­iz­a­tions such as the Ir­a­ni­an, the In­di­an, the Chinese, not to men­tion the worlds of Africa, Poly­ne­sia or the Amer­in­di­ans, barely ex­is­ted for us; it was so ob­vi­ous that they had all but suc­cumbed, like ourselves, be­fore the end­less pal­lid sun at the me­ridi­an of mod­ern­ity, in the world where (as Raoul Vanei­gem put it) “the guar­an­tee of not dy­ing of hun­ger was ex­changed for the guar­an­tee of dy­ing of bore­dom.”

Those years, 1971-1972-1973, were eer­ie. It seemed that all the re­volts of the pre­vi­ous three dec­ades had faded away with re­mark­able speed, leav­ing be­hind only the “new so­cial move­ments” of wo­men, blacks, Lati­nos, gays, and eco­lo­gists, mainly bat­tling their way in­to the main­stream. De­com­pres­sion: all the dark un­der­side, all the “repressed,” all the “il­li­cit” of the pre­vi­ously-cloistered mi­lieus of cul­tur­al op­pos­i­tion of the earli­er peri­od had sur­faced vi­ol­ently to be­come li­cit and ex­pli­cit. “Un­der­ground” was the be­labored, much-over­used word of the day, but these were find­ing their place in the dom­in­ant or­der. Long be­fore Fran­cis Fukuyama made him in­to a fad, we were delving in­to Kojève’s In­tro­duc­tion to the Read­ing of the Philo­sophy of Hegel, which seemed to echo our sense of be­ing at the end of something, if not ex­actly the “end of his­tory.”

In this at­mo­sphere, some turned to Fou­cault, whose idea of épistème in The Or­der of Things seemed lif­ted from Heide­g­ger’s no­tion of Geschick, the “des­tiny” or “sense of real­ity” be­neath all con­scious­ness or ac­tion of a cul­ture that oc­ca­sion­ally dis­ap­peared as mys­ter­i­ously as it came. (That Geschick for the West was the meta­phys­ics of “pres­ence,” or Be­ing re­duced to “rep­res­ent­a­tion.”) It was a wide­spread feel­ing at the time, pop­ular­ized above all in Kuhn’s the­ory of sci­entif­ic re­volu­tions, that in­deed his­tor­ic­al epochs were un­der­pinned by deep, un­spoken, shared as­sump­tions. Kuhn called them paradigms. The suc­ces­sion from one to the oth­er could not be called “pro­gress” to­ward any kind of “truth” out­side such paradigms, however, and cer­tainly could not be linked to any­thing like cap­it­al­ist ac­cu­mu­la­tion. The post-1960s funk was giv­ing way, willy-nilly, to the “post­mod­ern” be­lief that one could know only “sig­ni­fi­ers,” and per­haps to the be­lief that there were only sig­ni­fi­ers; few re­cog­nized then (as few re­cog­nize today) that such ideas were the night thoughts of cap­it­al in the same years, as it ac­cel­er­ated its muta­tion in­to its in­creas­ingly fict­ive form, seem­ingly de­tached from any re­la­tion­ship to pro­duc­tion or re­pro­duc­tion.

The war cry was the “over­throw of meta­phys­ics,” as meta­phys­ics had be­gun after Her­ac­litus. We were taken aback and in­trigued by the fact that the two op­posed views of Hegel and Heide­g­ger took off from the same Her­ac­litean frag­ment. So totally did ele­ments of the “real­iz­a­tion of meta­phys­ics” and the “over­throw of meta­phys­ics” re­semble each oth­er and yet were as ships passing in the night.

For Ni­et­z­sche, “meta­phys­ics” was the Pla­ton­ic world of ideas that fused with Judeo-Chris­ti­an uni­ver­sal­ity in late an­tiquity, the “lie on life” erec­ted “above” “real­ity,” from which life was to be judged, and found lack­ing. “Bet­ter lo­gic than life” was the view in­her­ited from Par­men­ides and Zeno, and at­tacked by Ni­et­z­sche in his early work Philo­sophy in the Tra­gic Age of the Greeks, and this view of a supra-tem­por­al, supra-spa­tial “concept” hov­er­ing over “life” re­mained a con­stant of his in­dict­ment of “West­ern ni­hil­ism” throughout. The West­ern tra­di­tion was “ni­hil­ist” be­cause this “concept,” this supra­tem­por­al supra­spa­tial vant­age point was pre­cisely “noth­ing,” empty, a diabol­ic­ally clev­er mani­fest­a­tion of weak-willed re­sent­ment con­trived to pull the “strong” down to the level of the “weak,” that later be­came the philo­sophy of Chris­ti­an mono­the­ism.

Heide­g­ger took over this prob­lem­at­ic and car­ried it much fur­ther. In his early peri­od (Be­ing and Time, 1927) he began where the late Ni­et­z­sche left off, and with the prob­lem­at­ic of the Ni­et­z­schean Su­per­man, the in­di­vidu­al shap­ing his own real­ity through an aes­thet­i­cized will-to-power con­strained only by the lim­its set by oth­er such wills. (Heide­g­ger, however, de­veloped an en­tirely dif­fer­ent lan­guage for this ana­lys­is, deeply marked by Kierkegaard, Husser­li­an phe­nomen­o­logy and pre-1914 Leben­s­philo­soph­ie.)But in his own later peri­od, he de­cided that both Ni­et­z­sche as well as his own early work had con­cluded West­ern meta­phys­ics, cul­min­at­ing in a plan­et­ary will-to-power to trans­form all real­ity in­to “pres­ence,” an im­age, a rep­res­ent­a­tion, as em­bod­ied in sci­ence and tech­no­logy.

Heide­g­ger, like Fou­cault after him, was aim­ing his cri­tique dir­ectly at dia­lect­ic­al thought, against the reas­on that tends to ab­sorb the oth­er in­to it­self, that un­der­stands all “oth­er­ness” as ali­en­a­tion. Or as Marx said, quot­ing the an­cient play­wright Ter­ence, “noth­ing hu­man is ali­en to me.” Against this kind of ra­tion­al­ity, Heide­g­ger tried to erect the wall of Dif­fer­enz, dif­fer­ence that was not dia­lect­ic­ally me­di­ated or su­per­seded by any his­tor­ic­al pro­cess, but just… dif­fer­ence.

In those years 1971-1972-1973, this vis­ion was made to ap­peal. As we at­temp­ted to un­der­stand the ab­stract cel­lo­phane in which cap­it­al­ism was wrap­ping all sen­su­ous real­ity, to see this ter­rible ab­strac­tion ori­gin­at­ing in the pre-So­crat­ics was all too in­triguing. Of course we knew too that this grew out of the ab­strac­tion of the com­mod­ity, though we paid less at­ten­tion to Marx­ist ana­lyses by Maurice Corn­forth, Al­fred Sohn-Reth­el show­ing the pre-So­crat­ics in ex­actly that con­text.

But did any­one ever no­tice that Friedrich Ni­et­z­sche emerged in the 1870s sim­ul­tan­eously with neo-clas­sic­al eco­nom­ics? Did any­one ever see him in re­la­tion­ship to the in­tens­ive phase of cap­it­al­ist ac­cu­mu­la­tion which, in the U.S. and in Ger­many, first took shape in that dec­ade?

The emer­gence of neoclas­sic­al eco­nom­ics (Wil­li­am Stan­ley Jevons, Carl Menger, Léon Walras) re­placed pro­duc­tion with con­sump­tion and in­di­vidu­al “pref­er­ences” as the bour­geois per­spect­ive on “eco­nom­ics” (as the re­place­ment for polit­ic­al eco­nomy came to be called). (Con­tem­por­ar­ies of the Aus­tri­an school, a dec­ade or two later, ex­pli­citly called this the “sub­jec­ti­fic­a­tion” of eco­nom­ics). Every­one knows that this shift in­volved the buri­al of the pre-Marx­ist labor the­ory of value as it had cul­min­ated in Ri­cardo and the Ri­car­d­i­an so­cial­ists of the 1840s. Most com­ment­ary has fo­cused on the link between post-1870s “eco­nom­ics” as a re­sponse to the ap­pear­ance of the so­cial­ist work­ers’ move­ment out of the 1848 re­volu­tions and the Par­is Com­mune; in the new cli­mate, it was ne­ces­sary to scrap nearly two cen­tur­ies of suc­cess­ively sharp at­tempts to show that labor was the source of all wealth. But less at­ten­tion has been de­voted to the shift in world ac­cu­mu­la­tion from pro­du­cer goods to con­sumer goods, closely tied to the world agrari­an mar­ket and the post-1873 world agrari­an de­pres­sion. This is the real­ity that pro­duced Ni­et­z­sche, and later Heide­g­ger. Ni­et­z­sche’s brack­et­ing of truth, the idea that “truth” was an aes­thet­ic cre­ation im­posed on chaos by the Su­per­man’s will-to-power, was the ex­treme ab­stract “high” the­or­iz­a­tion of the be­gin­ning of the era in which world ac­cu­mu­la­tion began, above all in Eng­land (still the cen­ter of the sys­tem at that time and for many dec­ades to come), to in­clude an im­port­ant fict­ive-ren­ti­er di­men­sion, and thus seemed to sim­il­arly brack­et any con­crete re­la­tion to pro­duc­tion and re­pro­duc­tion.

But there is more: Ni­et­z­sche’s and Heide­g­ger’s pro­foundly anti-dia­lect­ic­al stance, aimed against Hegel but re­bound­ing onto Marx, is a dir­ect at­tack on Marx’s the­ory of labor power.

The ap­pear­ance of the com­mun­ist move­ment in 1848 — the June days in Par­is, the Mani­festo — “cut his­tory in two,” just as Ni­et­z­sche him­self claimed to do a few dec­ades later. As the­or­ized by Marx, the ap­pear­ance of com­mun­ism posed in prac­tice the real­iz­a­tion and su­per­ses­sion of all pre­vi­ously ex­ist­ing philo­sophy, polit­ic­al eco­nomy and cul­ture. Com­mun­ism said in ef­fect: all pre­vi­ous cul­tur­al forms were ex­pres­sions of what so­ci­ety (i.e. hu­man powers) could not do; they were com­pens­a­tions and con­sol­a­tions for the fact that so­cial pro­gress pro­ceeded at the ex­pense of the in­di­vidu­al. The dis­tance between Na­po­leon I and Na­po­leon III as por­trayed in Marx’s Eight­eenth Bru­maire is pre­cisely this dis­tance between the two peri­ods. All bour­geois cul­ture after 1850, con­sciously or not, was a re­sponse to the chal­lenge posed by com­mun­ism, an at­tempt to main­tain the isol­ated in­di­vidu­al view­point in which it was in­creas­ingly clear what so­ci­ety could do, in which so­cial pro­gress no longer needed to pro­ceed at the ex­pense of the in­di­vidu­al but, on the con­trary, the in­di­vidu­al could at last ap­pro­pri­ate so­cial powers as his/her own.

Be­cause Marx’s the­ory of labor power was ex­actly the re­lo­ca­tion of Hegel’s world spir­it in the “in­di­vidu­al­ity as all-sided in its pro­duc­tion as in its con­sump­tion” (Grundrisse). It was a the­ory of self-re­flex­ive glob­al prax­is [sinn­liche umwälzende Tätigkeit], a the­ory of activ­ity in which the ob­ject was sim­ul­tan­eously the act­or. Com­mun­ist man “would fish in the morn­ing, hunt in the af­ter­noon and write crit­ic­al cri­ti­cism in the even­ing,” that is he would be not any spe­cif­ic pre­dic­ate but a re­la­tion­ship to a series of spe­cif­ic pre­dic­ates, and as such a re­la­tion­ship to him­self, and “the mul­ti­plic­a­tion of hu­man powers is its own end.” This is the so­cial real­iz­a­tion of Nich­olas of Cusa’s ac­tu­al in­fin­ity, and it is against this re­la­tion­ship that relates it­self to it­self [sich-selbst-ver­hal­tendes-Verhältnis] that all bour­geois thought, led by Ni­et­z­sche and Heide­g­ger, semi-con­sciously or con­sciously, was dir­ec­ted. And it is this at­tack on cre­at­ive labor power which the ter­ribly rad­ic­al post­mod­ern­ists take over lock, stock, and bar­rel. It may be a stretch to see Ni­et­z­sche’s and above all Heide­g­ger’s at­tempt to found an ir­re­du­cible, anti-dia­lect­ic­al dif­fer­ence (Der­rida later called it différance) as the the­or­et­ic­al an­ti­cip­a­tion of the flex­ible small firm, seg­men­ted mar­ket­ing and niche con­sump­tion, and “post-Ford­ist” meth­ods of pro­duc­tion (though it is ex­actly right to see them in re­la­tion­ship to post-1870 neoclas­sic­al eco­nom­ics). The in­ef­fable sense of hos­til­ity to “big­ness,” in the form of “bur­eau­cracy,” “mas­ter nar­rat­ives” of his­tory, large-scale pro­duc­tion, and so­cial ser­vices, i.e. everything that was the hall­mark, in bur­eau­crat­ic form, of the So­cial Demo­crat­ic, Sta­lin­ist and Third World stat­ist re­gimes of the first three dec­ades after World War II, hardly needed such eso­ter­ica, par­tic­u­larly in the U.S. But it is no ex­ag­ger­a­tion whatever to say that these the­or­ies swept the world, be­gin­ning in the early 1970s, as part of a gen­er­al war on the so­cial at every level, which was the cap­it­al­ist re­sponse to the 1968 up­surge and its af­ter­math. And be­hind the all-too-fa­cile at­tacks on “mas­ter nar­rat­ives” and “bur­eau­cracy,” the cap­it­al­ists and their ideo­logues — the the­or­eti­cians of “dif­fer­ence” — were after the real game of the unit­ary work­ing-class “sub­ject” which had ser­i­ously frightened them from 1968 to 1973. The pul­ver­iz­a­tion of any­thing that might be con­strued as a “gen­er­al in­terest,” the break­ing up of the big “work­er fort­resses” of De­troit, Manchester, Bil­lan­court, and Tur­in, the stag­ger­ing re­versal throughout the West, after 1968, of earli­er post­war trends to­ward great­er in­come equal­ity, the “iden­tity polit­ics” of vari­ous groups as­sert­ing they have noth­ing in com­mon with any­one else, the seem­ingly lim­it­less abil­ity of cap­it­al to at­tack, out­source and downs­ize without en­coun­ter­ing any “con­tra­dic­tion” un­der­min­ing it, all cre­ate the cli­mate for the post­mod­ern de­ri­sion of such “found­a­tion­al­ism,” for their “etern­ity of bad jokes,” while hope for a high­er or­gan­iz­a­tion of so­ci­ety bey­ond cap­it­al­ism seems to fade away by the day.

This was the so­cial and ideo­lo­gic­al world of the rad­ic­al­ized middle classes in the early 1970s. What was end­ing then and there was the world-his­tor­ic­al ca­reer of neg­a­tion, the­or­ized for mod­ern his­tory by Hegel’s civil ser­vant philo­sophy, the civil ser­vant with no re­la­tion­ship to the trans­form­a­tion of nature.

Neg­a­tion had ul­ti­mately be­gun with the Greeks in the point- line- plane- cube cos­mo­logy de­rived from the “di­vi­sion of nature” con­sum­mated by Zeno and Par­men­ides’ meta­phys­ic of the in­fin­ites­im­al, the idea of in­fin­ity as an asymp­tot­ic ad­vance in either space or time to a goal that was nev­er reached, as in Zeno’s para­doxes. Hence­forth, for the West­ern con­cep­tion of nature, the “in­fin­ite” was con­ceived as an “in­fin­ites­im­al” in both space (the point) and time (the in­stant), which in the early mod­ern peri­od ma­ter­i­al­ized it­self in New­ton’s phys­ics and was gen­er­al­ized from there to a whole “on­to­logy” in vir­tu­ally all areas of sci­ence and cul­ture. This mo­ment was the so­cial and epi­stem­o­lo­gic­al be­gin­ning of the “dead nature” that seemed every­where dom­in­ant in the 1950s and 1960s. Nature was lin­ear, as the lines of high mod­ern­ist tech­no­cracy and its ar­chi­tec­ture were lin­ear.

But from the epoch of bour­geois re­volu­tions, in Eng­land, Amer­ica, and above all in France, West­ern cul­ture was in­vaded for the first time by a con­scious­ness of his­tory as a di­men­sion of real­iz­a­tion, as ul­ti­mately the­or­ized in the work of G.F.W. Hegel. West­ern thought, in­clud­ing West­ern thought about nature, was “in­vaded” by time. For the first time it was real­ized that the real­ity of spe­cif­ic people in so­ci­ety was defined not by some stat­ic supra­tem­por­al ideal of Man but by what they had the po­ten­tial to be­come as so­cial classes, their his­tor­ic­al tra­ject­ory. That, and that alone, is the mean­ing of Hegel’s as­ser­tion that the “real is ra­tion­al,” however much the for­mu­la­tion, in a totally re­duc­tion­ist in­ter­pret­a­tion, has been used or un­der­stood as an apo­logy for this or that status quo.

It is more dif­fi­cult today, after more than three dec­ades of eco­lo­gism and en­vir­on­ment­al­ism, to re­mem­ber to what ex­tent mod­ern cul­ture from the sev­en­teenth and eight­eenth cen­tury bour­geois re­volu­tions to the 1960s evolved with the in­creas­ing brack­et­ing of “dead nature.” The Hegel renais­sance of the 1950s and 1960s, so es­sen­tial for New Left Marx­ism (in com­bin­a­tion with the de­cant­ing of many of Marx’s pre­vi­ously un­known writ­ings, both from the 1840s and up to his writ­ings on the Rus­si­an com­mune and the Eth­no­lo­gic­al Note­books) was per­haps the cul­min­a­tion of this trend. Yet hard be­hind the Hegel renais­sance in Marx­ism was the re­cov­ery (elab­or­ated by Ernst Bloch, Leszek Kołakowski and oth­ers) of the more gen­er­al neo-Pla­ton­ic sources of the Marxi­an dia­lectic, in Plotinus, Erigena, Eck­hart, Cusa, Bruno, and Boehme; of the natura natur­ans view of nature of the same tra­di­tion, and side by side with that, the idea of ac­tu­al in­fin­ity first ar­tic­u­lated by Cusa and Bruno, and passing through Spinoza and Leib­n­iz in­to Hegel and Marx. The lat­ter two are com­pon­ents of an en­tirely dif­fer­ent con­cep­tion of nature and sci­ence. And yet it was ex­actly of the lat­ter two, and of such an al­tern­at­ive con­cep­tion of nature and sci­ence, that the New Left (along with the rest of so­ci­ety) was ut­terly ig­nor­ant in the 1960s.

Such ig­nor­ance was pos­sible and sus­tained by the re­ified view of his­tory in­her­ited from the 18th cen­tury En­light­en­ment, which cre­ated a pot­ted ret­ro­spect­ive in which this en­tire lin­eage, deeply en­twined with re­li­gion and mys­ti­cism, was largely in­vis­ible, or at best a series of sec­ond­ary trib­u­tar­ies, mak­ing pos­sible the view of meta­phys­ics against which Ni­et­z­sche and Heide­g­ger took over the field.

The Heide­g­ger vs. Hegel coun­ter­pos­i­tion could only emerge in a world that looked with pos­it­iv­ist lenses right through the peri­od 1450-1650 of the sci­entif­ic re­volu­tion cul­min­at­ing in New­ton, and the “re­birth of pa­gan­ism” that led to the En­light­en­ment, a world that paid no at­ten­tion to Plotinus, Erigena, Nich­olas of Cusa, Bruno, Kepler, Boehme, Leib­n­iz, Spinoza on the ques­tions of “ac­tu­al in­fin­ity” and natura natur­ans. Heide­g­ger was only pos­sible against a tra­di­tion ob­li­vi­ous to these real­it­ies. Al­most no one ex­cept Bloch, Kołakowski, and a few oth­ers re­cog­nized that Marx had trans­posed that tra­di­tion to a ma­ter­i­al­ist view of so­ci­ety and nature. Only a few re­cog­nize it, even today.

For the cul­ture of the 1960s — and “post­mod­ern­ism” and “cul­tur­al stud­ies” today still live off of the 1960s, or more spe­cific­ally off the de­feat of the 1960s — can­not be un­der­stood without a re­cog­ni­tion of how trun­cated its his­tor­ic­al sense was. It was not merely “Euro­centric.” With all the in­ver­ted pat­ri­ot­ism and cheer­lead­ing for the Vi­et­cong, Guevarist guer­ril­las, and Mao’s China, it was “Euro­centric” in a very spe­cial way. Moreover, it was blind to everything in the his­tory of the West it­self which did not lead to the tech­no­crat­ic, sci­ent­ist­ic “man­aged” world it pre­sumed to in­hab­it. Like the reign of Ur­izen that Blake warned against, mod­ern­ist cul­ture as­sumed the infâme trin­ity of Locke, New­ton, and Voltaire to be the un­ques­tioned (if of­ten un­re­cog­nized) founders of its world. It ac­cep­ted that six­teenth-sev­en­teenth cen­tury sep­ar­a­tion of Geist and Natur that did not ex­ist for a Bruno or a Kepler; it lived off it. It did not “see” ex­cept as an­ti­quar­i­an­ism the as­tro­logy, al­chemy, Kab­ba­l­ah, and Neo-Pla­ton­ism of the Renais­sance; it did not “see” the mul­tiple edi­tions of the works of the Ger­man mys­tic Jac­ob Boehme pub­lished at the height of the Eng­lish Re­volu­tion of the 1640s. Re­volu­tions, sci­entif­ic or polit­ic­al, were sec­u­lar, anti-re­li­gious af­fairs, and so the “mean­ing­ful past” was strictly sec­u­lar and anti-re­li­gious as well.

The cri­tique of the En­light­en­ment im­pli­cit or ex­pli­cit in the Bloch-Kołakowski et al. re­cov­ery of the neo-Pla­ton­ic sources of the Marxi­an dia­lectic (as some of the fol­low­ing es­says ar­gue) has noth­ing to do with most of the stu­pid cri­ti­cisms of the En­light­en­ment today pro­mul­gated by ig­nor­ant aca­dem­ics for whom his­tory began with the post-1968 trans­la­tions of the Frank­furt School and Fou­cault. It rather cri­tiques the tri­umph of the New­ton-Locke-Voltaire world view from the vant­age point of the “road not taken,” rep­res­en­ted by the Cusa-Bruno-Kepler-Boehme-Spinoza-Leib­n­iz stream of “ac­tu­al in­fin­ity” and “natura natur­ans,” and point­ing to a unit­ary sci­ence.

In­stead of the de­vel­op­ment of this “stream,” which pos­its a unit­ary the­ory en­com­passing both so­ci­ety and nature (“we know only one sci­ence, the sci­ence of his­tory” as Marx and En­gels wrote in The Ger­man Ideo­logy) we have today le­gions of people with a smat­ter­ing of know­ledge turn­ing out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) pro­duced by a com­puter pro­gram, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest hu­man­it­ies pro­gram or aca­dem­ic con­fer­ence. Every­one these people don’t like is trapped in a “gaze”; every­one “con­sti­tutes” their “iden­tity” by “dis­course”; to the fuddy-duddy “mas­ter nar­rat­ives” that talk about such in­del­ic­ate sub­jects as world ac­cu­mu­la­tion these people coun­ter­pose pas­tiche and bri­c­ol­age, the very idea of be­ing in any way sys­tem­at­ic smack­ing of “to­tal­it­ari­an­ism”; it is blithely as­sumed that every­one ex­cept het­ero­sexu­al white males now and for all time have been “sub­vers­ives” (one won­ders why we are still liv­ing un­der cap­it­al­ism); Joyce schol­ars give way to Howdy Doody schol­ars, who of course look askance on “priv­ileging” any par­tic­u­lar kind of “writ­ing”; the Amer­ic­an pop­u­la­tion that spends an av­er­age of six hours a day watch­ing tele­vi­sion and three hours a day at shop­ping malls is thereby “res­ist­ing” and “sub­vert­ing” con­sumer cul­ture; a crip­pling re­lativ­ism makes it some­how “im­per­i­al” to cri­ti­cize pub­lic be­head­ings in Saudi Ar­a­bia or cliterodec­tomy prac­ticed on five-year old girls in the Su­dan (isn’t that an au­thor­it­ari­an im­pos­i­tion of stand­ards from out­side?). The French Re­volu­tion was an at­tempt to re­im­pose con­trol over wo­men, or was a the­at­ric “ritu­al” in­ven­ted by the nine­teenth cen­tury, and thus did in fact not oc­cur; for Baudril­lard, the Gulf War did not oc­cur either; we don’t know if the gen­o­cide of the Jews took place be­cause we have only dif­fer­ent “nar­rat­ives” about it (and everything is of course only a nar­rat­ive, and none are defin­it­ive). At in­ter­na­tion­al con­fer­ences Moslem and Hindu fun­da­ment­al­ist wo­men brush off cri­ti­cism of their ret­ro­gres­sion­ist move­ments with quo­ta­tions from Fou­cault and Der­rida; pop­u­lar sci­ence pro­grams in Third World coun­tries are sav­aged as “im­per­i­al­ist” with sim­il­ar quo­ta­tions. The post­mod­ern­ist re­lat­iv­ists thought out their views with West­ern im­per­i­al­ism in mind, and don’t have much too say when con­fron­ted by bar­bar­ic atav­isms from “sub­al­tern” cul­tures, whose first vic­tims are those trapped in this or that pa­ro­chi­al group by the very anti-uni­ver­sal­ism for which the post­mod­ern­ists led the charge.