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What is missing in Lyotard is the sense that it is the moral choices that have both multiplied and collectively diminished. In his superb attempt at pulling together the strands of the postmodern condition, Zygmunt Bauman sees that the modern was bound up with the idea of Bentham's Panopticon, that the grizzly history of industrialism was bound up with the workhouse, the poorhouse, the prison, the slave camp, the lunatic asylum, the `factory', the gulag, the concentration camp, the military barracks. In some cases - Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, Hitler's Germany - the prison became the model for all social order; in others - the post-bellum United States, Peron's Argentina, Nationalist South Africa, Eretz Israel, occupied Vietnam and Cambodia - it became a partial one. The search for collective utopias went hand-in-hand with these collective brutalities. The collapse of the Berlin Wall, if it symbolizes anything, surely stands for the collapse of both the idea of mechanized terror and of collective utopias. Two certainties have been destroyed: the certainty that there is a Big Bad Brother out There who will surely destroy us or herd us into camps and the certainty that We Shall Overcome. What is left is the world of imagined communities in which "it is the symbolic significance that counts" and in which "the postmodern privitization of fears has prompted and will prompt a furious search for communal shelters all the more vehement and potentially lethal for the brittle, imagined existence of communities" (Bauman, 1992: xx-xxi). Within this is played out what Bauman calls "the ethical paradox of postmodernity." This paradox is one that "restores to agents the fullness of moral choice and responsibility while simultaeously depriving them of the comfort of universal guidance that modern self-confidence once promised" (xxii). Thus the absolute certainties that guided both the organisers of `development', `progress', `exploration', and so on, as well as those held by those they dominated, are fragmented to so many particular moralities. The need to be sure of my own ethical bearings and the impossibility of imposing them on others provides the tension of contemporary life.
Much of this, as Bauman acknowledges, owes its force to the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. The language of modernism was, by and large, a monological one, in which the sense of a determining narrative overrode all others to provide a mode of discussion which burried other voices. Bakhtin's project was to unveil the hidden voices, to make the utterences heard. And he did this without allowing the Many to become Any, so that absolute relativism of narcissistic indulgence in word-play pulled apart the monologic in such a way that there was no dialogue, merely deconstruction. Bakhtin's dialogic principle was based on finding collective voices of the marketplace, the street, the factory, and in creating the basis by which the laughter, the jokes, the acting-out, the performances and the carnivalesque could not only reveal the language of the people, but also provide an alternative making of history.
Every act of world history was accompanied by a laughing chorus. But not every period of history had Rabelais for coryphaeus. Though he led the popular chorus of only one time, the Renaissance, he so fully and clearly revealed the peculiar and difficult language of the laughing people that his work sheds light on the folk culture of humour belonging to other ages. (Bakhtin,1984:474)
In Bauman's account of the postmodern, this laughing chorus becomes the ethical paradox of the "struggle with the unfamiliar" and the voice of the new tribalism and the imagined communities suggested by Benedict Anderson, Michel Maffesoli and Agnes Heller. If we wish to find the strategy for continuing to work, to survive, to live, we must therefore recognize that the task of being the Rabelais of the postmodern world is a great deal more complex than even Bakhtin imagined. Bauman suggests that the contemporary world is situated at the intersection between `seduction' and `repression' in which `market dependency' replaces old life-skills with new ones, the "shifting disaffection and conflict from the area of political struggle to the area of commodities and entertainment....the penetration of the `private' sphere to an ever growing degree, disempowering of the objects of normative regulation as autonomous agents" (112). Thus the task of the sociologist (and we are talking as sociologists) is to explore the antinomies of `control-through-repression' and `control-through-seduction' and thus to place sociology not as the managers or hand-servants of a new social order, but as its interpreters and critics.
This provides a different vantage-point for viewing the task that Lyotard set himself. By burying his arguments in the ways that science proceeds with its work, and by taking Kapital as a given, remorseless logic, Lyotard can only fish around for alternative allies in his drifting. His exploration into the arts and into the finer points of Judaic imagery, ignore the ethical dilemmas of our present condition and leave us stranded on the inter-webbed shore. The task is more serious than Lyotard imagined, and the lenses through which we view the predicament of knowledge and action might be very different.
In an interview at the end of Intimations of Postmodernity, Zygmunt Bauman discusses his perception of the Holocaust (and it is worth contrasting this or, indeed, Bauman's own book on the Holocaust, with Lyotard's chapter "Discussions, or Phrasing after Auschwitz" , 360-392 in Lyotard, 1989). After mentioning the impact that Janina Bauman's Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl's Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond had on him, he comments:
I saw the Holocaust as a picture on the wall, and then, suddenly, I saw it as a window, through which you can see other things. So I became fascinated, intellectually fascinated, with this issue, and, step by step, while starting reading the literature and trying to recover the experience from other people's reports, I came to the third stage...I discovered that peculiar condition in which Jews were first cast in the second half of the nineteenth century. If one goes through the ideas of people like Marx, Freud, George Simmel, Kafka, all these people who actually created what we call modern culture and beyond that, to people like Levi-Strauss, Levinas, Derrida, or lesser figures, lesser known, like Jabes or Shestov, but also quite influential in shaping the essential categories of modern culture - one can find some sort of (I will use the Weberian term) elective affinity between the enforced condition of social suspension in the process of assimilation, and the kind of penetrating, perceptive, insightful modern culture which saw through the modernity deception. (226)
Lyotard's invocation of the Judaic remains the Picture on the Wall, just as his nomadic drifters are fragments of an imagination unlocated in time or space. For all the radical "insistence on narrative analysis in which the narratives themselves henceforth seem impossible" (Jameson, `Foreward' to Lyotard, 1984b: xx), the ellective affinities between those who thought through the narratives is absent. And this is surely crucial if the importance of the postmodern is to be seen as more than simply the domination of science as a performative principle of everyday language. Bauman's exploration of the Judaic sensibility in wresting with the modern gives us the opportunity to explore all of our encounters with the modern and postmodern. For what Lyotard leaves with us are a series of graphic images in which the modern and the postmodern are collapsed, particularily in his writings on art. But THAT Jewish sensibility was not located purely in Freud's terror of graven images. The exploration of the Jewish encounter with the image has not yet been written, but it would have to include discussions on the work of Chagall, of Max Raphael, of Walter Benjamin, of John Berger, of Jonathan Miller as a Theatre Director and Television Producer, and, much more to the point, the importance of Jews in the development of the American Film and television industry. Lyotard's aesthetics is ultimately thus not a `postmodernist' one, but one which is still bound up with the sense of `high modernism'. (See Jameson's `Foreward', particularily pp xv-xix, for a critique of Lyotard's aesthetics). Walter Benjamin gave us several snapshots of the way that the image has been transformed, re-made, transgressed. There is nothing of this in Lyotard. The picture stays on the wall for the prurient gaze of the disobedient son. Lyotard is the curator of the postmodern museum.
I have treated Lyotard's work as an engagement with Jewish thought and culture for a particular reason. Lyotard's `postmodernism' dwells in the realm of pure abstraction. The artefacts that he trucks out for our gaze are disembodied and lifeless. Even the surfer of the cybernet is a disembodied being, confined to the museum of a future and virtual history. In this, Lyotard is no better than the Kapital or Science of his imagination. His Jews are equally abstract, as they were for Hegel. What Bauman suggests as the route for reading the Jewish experience through how the Jewish intellectuals came to terms with modernity would be as true of Blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Brazilians, Spanish Americans. Unless we can begin to understand those accounts, those theorizings, we will not even begin to understand the meaning of the great cultural transformations on which we are embarked. If Lyotard's writing is based on form as the substance of change, then the real image of postmodernism is how the content transforms the form (to transpose one of Marshall McLuhan's favourite aphorisms). And content is rooted in the existential experiences that try to explode the form. Many Jews are still with us, in spite of a mechanized, calculated extermination that was both part of a folk memory and a direct consequence of the will to global power. Their negotiations (both before and after the Holocaust) are part of the grounding of all of our experiences. But we should not fool ourselves that the Jews alone are bearers to witness of the transformation. The whole world contains within it exemplars of the terror of the modernist will to power. Lyotard's museum, with its closed view, at least preserves some of the necessary artefacts. But it is necessary, if we are to take the condition of post-modernity seriously, to open the windows and look at the refuse that has been accumulated outside.
And so, as intellectuals, what do we do? Who am I? we ask with Lyotard, Bauman and Marcuse. But Lyotard and Marcuse barely answered that question. Bauman's answer is much more suggestive:
All this is rather intellectual and unemotional. And so I am -in this sense, I was, and remain - a stranger. I like very much what three people said about the Jews. One is the playwright Fredric Raphael; he is extremely conscious of being a Jew, as you know, and quite active in spelling out what it means. But he said that `the meaning of being a Jew is that I am everywhere out of place.' That's one statement. The second statement is by George Steiner, who said that `my homeland is my typewriter.' And the third statement, made by Wittgenstein, was that `the only place where real philosophical problems could be tackled and resolved is the railway station.' These three statements point in the same same direction. And I think this `nowhere', as these people said, is an intellectually fertile situation. You are somewhat less constrained by the rules, and see beyond. (Bauman, 1992: 226-7)
And so postmodernism, if it is true to itself, is, as a wise Zen master once said, the sound of one hand clapping.
Ioan Davies is Professor of Sociology and Social and Political Thought at York University, North York, Canada. He is the author of several books, most recently Writers in Prison (1990) and Cultural Studies and Beyond (1995). Culture at the Margins will be published in 1997. Work on this article was helped by a grant from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada.
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