I am at my parents’
house in New Jersey. I am spending time with my family. I don’t have enough
time to blog today so I am posting an essay by Frederic Jameson, which I
remember liking. It is called ‘End of
Art’ or ‘End of History’? It’s a part of a collection of his essays called The
Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 (Verso, London
1998). I am reading things like this a lot and other things that are not like
this. Maybe this is something that will be of interest to some of you.
The format is left
from the copy paste which might look weird but it might make it easier to read
on smartphones in this format. I’m not sure. If it is not, sorry. There are
some copy glitches too, sorry.
Enjoy, talk to you
next week. Spend time with your families if you like them.
'End of Art' or 'End
of History' ?
The debate about the
'end of history', assuming it is still on,
seems to have driven
out the very memory of its predecessor,
the debate about the
'end of art', which was hotly pursued in
the sixties, now some
thirty years ago, it is strange to think.
Both of these debates
derive from Hegel and reproduce a
characteristic turn in
his thinking about history, or in the form
of his historical
narrative, if you prefer: I trust we are by now
far enough 'along in
our consciousness of the narrative structure
of historicity that we
can forget about hoary old chestnuts about
the evils of
totalization or teleology. At any rate, the excitement
about the Fukuyamal
Kojeve contribution - welcomed fully as
much by a certain Left
as by a certain Right - shows that Hegel
may not be as
old-fashioned as people used to say and think.
Here I want to compare
these two highly suggestive and
symptomatic debates
and try to determine what that comparison
has to tell us about
the historical conjuncture in which we
find ourselves. I have
consistently argued, over the last few
years, that that
conjuncture is marked by a dedifferentiation of
fields, such that
economics has come to overlap with culture:
that everything,
including commodity production and high and
speculative finance,
has become cultural; and culture has equally
become profoundly
economic or commodity oriented. Thus it
will not surprise you
to learn that conjectures about our current
situation can be taken
as statements about late capitalism or
about the politics of
globalization. But maybe that is to get a
little ahead of
ourselves here.
So let's close our
eyes, and by a powerful trance-like effort of
73
the imagination try to
think our way back into the halcyon era
of the 1 960s when the
world was still young. The simplest way
of approaching the
'end of art' debate can be discerned via a
recollection of one of
the hottest fashions or crazes of those
bygone years, namely
the emergence of the so-called happenings,
discussed by everyone
from Marcuse to the Sunday supplements.
I never thought much
of happenings myself, and
would tend to
recontextualize them in the large movement of
theatrical innovation
generally: for what we call the sixties -
which may be said to
have begun (slowly) in 1 963, with the
Beatles and the
Vietnam War, and to have ended dramatically
somewhere around 1 973
-75 with the Nixon shock and the oil
crisis, and also with
what is again derisively known as the 'loss'
of Saigon - was
amongst other things an extraordinarily rich
moment, the richest
since the 1 920s, in the invention of new
kinds of performances
and staging of all the canonical playbooks
inherited from the
cultural past of world literature
generally: it suffices
to mention the Hallischer Vfer, let alone
Schiffbauer Damm,
Peter Brook or Grotowski, the Theatre du
soleil, the TNP or Olivier's
National Theatre, and the off Broadway
theatre of the New
York stage, let alone the production
of Beckett and
so-called anti-theatre, to conjure back a
whole universe of
playacting and representational excitement in
which, clearly enough,
the so-called happenings necessarily take
their place.
I hope it will not be
misunderstood if I follow a number of
historians of the
period in suggesting that it was an era of great
performances and
creative mise en
scene, rather than one of an
original composition
and production of new dramas (despite
the prestige of the
few genuine playwrights like Beckett whose
names stud the rosters
of the era): new stagings of Shakespeare
around the globe, in
other words, rather than new and unimaginable
Shakespeares on all
kinds of unlikely stages of the
world-theatre ( but
let's not waste our time in the amusing
exercise of thinking
of the names of the exceptions, like Soyenka
or Fugard) . All I
wanted to suggest at this point was that
theatrical practice in
this period stands at a certain minimal
distance from the
texts it presupposes as its pretexts and
conditions of
possibility: happenings would then push this
74
situation to its
extreme limit, by claiming to do away with the
pretext of the text
altogether and offering a spectacle of the
sheerest performance
as such, which also paradoxically seeks to
abolish the boundary
and the distinction between fiction and
fact, or art and life.
At this point, I must
also remind you of what everyone in our
kind of society today
tries to forget: namely that this was a
passionately political
period, and that innovations in the arts,
and in particular
innovations in the theatre, even those of the
most aestheticizing
and least politically aware performers and
directors, were always
driven by the firm conviction that
theatrical performance
was also a form of praxis, and that
changes in the
theatre, however minimal, were also contributions
to a general change in
life itself, and in the world and the
society of which the
theatre was both a part and a mirror. In
particular, I think it
would scarcely be an exaggeration to
suggest that the
politics of the sixties, all over the world and
specifically including
the 'wars of national liberation', was
defined and
constituted as an opposition to the American war
in Vietnam, in other
words, as a world-wide protest. Theatrical
innovation then also
staged itself as the symbolic gesture of
aesthetic protest, as
formal innovation grasped in terms of social
and political protest
as such, above and beyond the specifically
aesthetic and
theatrical terms in which the innovation was
couched.
Meanwhile, in a
narrower sense as well, the .very deployment
of the theory of the
'end of art' was also political, insofar as it
was meant to suggest
or to register the profound complicity of
the cultural
institutions and canons, of the museums and the
university system, the
state prestige of all the high arts, in the
Vietnam War as a
defence of Western values: somethIng that
also presu,pposes a
high level of investment in official culture
and an influential
status in society of high culture as an
extension of state
power. On my view, this is truer today, when
nobody cares any more,
than it was in those days, particularly
in an exceedingly
anti-intellectual United States. Hans Haacke
is then perhaps a more
fitting emblem of that view of things
than most of the
artists of that period; but the political reminder
is at least useful to
the degree to which it identifies a left-wing
75
provenance for the
theory of the 'end of art', in contrast with
the markedly
right-wing spirit of the current 'end of history' .
What did Hegel himself
mean by the 'end of art' - a phrase
he is unlikely to have
used himself in quite that sloganeering
fashion ? The notion
of an immanent 'end of art' is in Hegel
something like a
deduction from the premises of several conceptual
schemes or models
which are superimposed one upon the
other. Indeed, the
richness of Hegel's thought - as with any
interesting thinker -
stems not from the ingenuity or the
pertinence or any
particular individual concept, but rather from
the way in which, in
the thinker in question, several distinct
systems of concepts
coexist and fail to coincide. Imagine models
floating above each
other as in distinct dimensions: it is not
their homologies that
prove suggestive or fruitful, but rather the
infinitesimal
divergences, the imperceptible lack of fit between
the levels -
extrapolated out into a continuum whose stages
range from the
pre-choate and the quizzical gap, to the nagging
tension and the
sharpness of contradiction itself - genuine
thinking always taking
place within empty places, these voids
that suddenly appear
between the most powerful conceptual
schemes. Thinking is
thus not the concept, but the breakdown
in the relationships
between the individual concepts, isolated in
their splendour like
so many galactic systems, drifting apart in
the empty mind of the
world.
Characteristically,
Hegel's models or subsystems are all compulsively
tidied up into those
triplications which the contemporary
reader needs to
disregard - as a kind of weird and obsessive
numerological
superstition - in order to make this densely
tortuous text1
interesting for herself. Relevant for us at this
point are but two of
the famous triadic progressions: that of
absolute spirit - or
rather the movement towards that absolute
of 'objective spirit',
as it passes through the three stages of
religion, art and
philosophy; and that of art itself, as it passes
more modestly through
the three more local stages of the
symbolic, the
classical and the romantic . . . towards what?
Towards the end of
art, of course, and the abolition of the
aesthetic by itself
and under its own internal momentum, the
self-transcendence of
the aesthetic towards something else,
something supposedly
better than its own darkened and figural
76
mirror - the splendour
and transparency of Hegel's utopian
notion of philosophy
itself, the historical self-consciousness of
an absolute present
(which will also turn out to be that selfsame
allegedly prophetic
notion of the so-called 'end of history' )
- in short, the
shaping power o f the human collectivity over its
own destiny, at which
point it founders (for us here and now)
into an
incomprehensible, unimaginable, utopian temporality
beyond what thought
can reach.
No doubt other
subsystems in Hegel's immense dictee - the
compulsive graphomanic
lifelong transcription of what some
daimon of the absolute
muttered to him day-in day-out at the
very limits of syntax
and language itself - could be profitably
added to the mix of
these superscriptions. But it will be enough
today to convince
ourselves of the secret and productive discrepancies
between these two,
that otherwise seem to have so much
in common: marching as
they do from the only obscurely and
unconsciously figural,
through the assumption of the sheer
autopoiesis of the
play of figuration as such, towards the sheer
transparency of an end
of figuration in the philosophical and
the historically
self-conscious, in a situation in which thought
has expunged the last
remnants of figures and tropes from the
fading and luminous
categories of abstraction itself.
I believe that it is
the peculiar emergence of the 'sublime' in
the wrong place in
these various schemes and progressions that
gives us the deeper
clue to Hegel's thinking. Let's try to work
through them In . a
flat-footed and deliberately literal, oversimplified
and unimaginative
fashion. In that case, the first moment
of history - religion,
pre-Christian religion, or better still, nonWestern
religion as such - is
one in which humanity thinks and
is collectively
conscious without genuine self-consciousness: or
rather, to be a little
more precise, since consciousness without
self-consciousness is
a kind of contradiction in terms - in which
humanity is
collectively conscious but only unconsciously selfconscious:
in short, in which it
thinks in images and figures; in
which it makes
external forms and shapes, the mass and variety
of matter as such,
think for itself and rear up, deliriously selffashion
itself into the fetish-logic
of the great classical religions,
very much in the later
sense and spirit of Feuerbach and Marx
himself. I wish we had
time to examine Hegel's remarkably
77
resourceful evocations
of Indian ornament and Egyptian hieroglyph,
which return over and
over again like leitmotiven
in
Hegel's lifework, and
offer the ultimate clues as to his own
conception of the
figural and figuration as such.
The more familiar
version of all this, however, the one you
know already from so
many carefully controlled contemporary
approaches to a single
local zone of Hegel's system, is our old
friend the pyramid:
the mass of matter in which somewhere a
little spark of living
spirit dwells; that monumental outer shape
whose very form - too
vast to articulate the differentiations of
concrete thinking as
such - nonetheless designates, as over some
immense distance, the
indwelling presence of the form of
consciousness itself.
Body and spirit no doubt; matter and mind;
except that it would
be better to say that these barren conceptual
oppositions and dual
isms ultimately derive from the deadend
of religious
figuration, than that, the other way around,
Hegel's notion of the
problematical structure of religion replicates
and reproduces the
most banal inherited philosophical
stereotype of the
tradition.
What happens now,
however, is unexpected: instead of the
logical and
predictable outcome - that matter would simply
transcend itself in
spirit, that figuration would disengage itself
from its material
trappings and at once into abstract thought as
such - the next step
is one in which figuration is as it were
distracted in its
ultimate mission and destiny and mired even
more dangerously
within matter and the body itself. It is the
moment of the Greeks -
of classical art - which scandalously
erupts and disrupts
the teleology of human history and the
movement from Asia to
Western Europe, from the great Other
of the Eastern
religions and empires to the masterful centred
self of Western
philosophy and capitalist industrial production.
The Romans fit that
scheme, but not the Greeks, who offer a
dangerous and
tantalizing, misleading vision of the new and
ultimate human age: of
a world in which only human measure
obtains and the human
body itself constitutes the very source
and fountainhead of
political philosophy; a kind of corporeal
humanism in which the
secret Pythagorean harmonies of the
golden mean suggest a
rationality of the human body itself and
its proportions, and
for the briefest of instants delude us into
78
thinking that the
final form of a truly human world and of an
achieved philosophy
has been reached.
Hegel must denounce
the idolatry of this outcome, in order
to get history moving
again; he must throw a sop to the classical
passions of his
contemporaries, while gently prodding them to
move on, and quietly
but insistently reminding them that
Christianity still
remains on the agenda, along with Tacitus's
Germania,
and breathes a peremptory
authority capable of
surmounting and
overriding all such lingering classical
nostalgia.
As for Christianity
itself, and the now dominant Germanic
fact of Western
Europe, it is important to remember that for
Hegel and his
contemporaries, it is scarcely even to be thought
of as a religion any
longer: its triadic obsessions and trinitarian
logics pass via the
Reformation over into the abstractions of
German classical
philosophy, of the objective idealism of
Hegel's own
generation, sufficiently trained in dead theological
categories and their
immanent dialectical movement, to defiguralize
all that faint persistent
sacred decoration at the speed
of the Cartesian coup de pouce into the henceforth secular
profundities of
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel himself. It is the
tortured individual
body of Christ2 that will serve as the
decompression chamber
through which a generation obsessed
with Greek bodies
disintoxicates itself and passes over into the
rather different
pleasures and satisfactions of abstraction as
such, and what these
Germans call the Absolute: the individual
body was not really
meaningful after all, but rather the human
collectivity, with
whose apotheosis Marx will complete the
Hegelian system,
stalled on its way to the end of history by the
unexpected regression
of the ultramodern Prussian state into
despotic and fanatical
reaction.
Thus, ChristIanity seems
to dissolve fairly effortlessly into
classical German
philosophy, j ust as the Germanic tribal tradition
seems to lead directly
into modernity itself: if you place
Luther and
Protestantism squarely in the middle of this historical
development, the idea
may seem less parochial, let alone
chauvinistic. But
there is clearly a problem with the final stage
of Hegel's tripartite
scheme: what he calls the Romantic form
of art. It is a formal
problem: to begin with, he needs this stage
79
to constitute a dialectical
climax to the Aesthetics.
Whatever
kind of historical
narrative the dialectic may have been - and it
was certainly as fresh
and stunningly paradoxical in its day as
the competing
historical narratives of Derridean supplementarity
or Freudian Nachtraglichkeit in our own - it clearly required
the third stage in
some satisfying sense as fully to realize the
preceding ones as to
dissolve them and pass on into something
else.
Christianity, again,
will provide the hinge on which an
unconvincing solution
is arranged: for medieval art can now
stand as the strong
content of the Romantic form, as the most
original raw material
of this aesthetic modernity; while the
medieval nostalgia of
the contemporary German Romantics -
the Schlegels, whom
Hegel hated, the converts who confused
Italy with Roman
Catholicism, the Nazarene painters and the
various exiles
southward of the Alps - these weak survivals of a
medieval Roman
Catholic culture that was genuinely 'Romantic'
( or modern, in the
broader sense of Hegel's world history)
help prove the point
by fastening art helplessly to an inescapable
medieval and Christian
mission, while testifying to the debility
of such nostalgic
revivals in the present day (let's say 1 820 or
so) and thereby
demonstrating the urgency of a transition into
some dialectically new
and different era, and the claims of
philosophy to replace
this sorry aesthetic floundering with
something more
vigorous and decisive. The ambiguity extends
into Hegel's very use
of the word Romantic, not generally a
positive epithet under
his pen: those for whom the German
Romantics, and in
particular Friedrich Schlegel again, have
today come to be seen
as precursors of peculiarly contemporary
practices and thoughts
of our own, will have no great trouble
maliciously diagnosing
Hegel's distaste for the Romantics as the
anxiety of competition
and the prescient sense of the dangers
offered by Romantic
irony and self-consciousness to the sway
and claims posed by
the dialectic itself.
In any case, whatever
reading one chooses to make of Hegel's
final stage of art,
few historical prognoses have been so disastrously
wrong. Whatever the
validity of Hegel's feelings about
Romanticism, those
currents which led on into what has come
to be called modernism
are thereby surely to be identified with
80
one of the most
remarkable flourishings of the arts in all of
human history.
Whatever the 'end of art' may mean for us,
therefore, it was
emphatically not on the agenda in Hegel's own
time. And, as far as
the other part of the prophecy was
concerned, the
supersession of art by philosophy, he could not
have chosen a worse
historical moment for this pronouncement
either; indeed, if we
follow the practice of Hegel and his
contemporaries in
identifying philosophy with system as such,
then few will wish to
deny that in that sense, far from being a
forerunner of a truly
philosophical age, Hegel was rather the
last philosopher in
the tradition: and this in two senses, by being
utterly subsumed and
transfigured in and by Marxism as a kind
of post-philosophy,
and also by having occupied this philosophical
terrain so completely
as to leave all later purely philosophical
efforts (which in our
own time have come rather to be
identified as theory)
to constitute so many local guerrilla raids
and anti-philosophical
therapies, from Nietzsche to pragmatism,
from Wittgenstein to
deconstruction.
Yet there is another
sense in which Hegel was right and truly
prophetic bout all
this, and it is this secret truth, this moment
of truth in the
utterly aberrant and seemingly misguided, that
we must now try to
grasp. 'Philosophy,' said Adorno, in one of
his most famous
aphorisms, 'philosophy, which once seemed
obsolete, lives on
because the moment to realise it was missed'.
It is true that the
'end of philosophy' did not figure among our
official topics here,
but Adorno's extraordinary remark offers a
richer picture of the
'end' of something than anything we have
hitherto confronted:
an end which is a realization, which can be
missed, and whose
omission results in little more than a sorry
afterlife and
second-best, which is however still essential (the
other 'end' of
philosophy, as far as Adorno was concerned, the
supersession of
philosophy by positivism and anti-theory, is for
him so pernicious as
to call forth 'critical theory' as a way of
keeping the negative
alive in a period in which praxis, the unity
of the negative and
the positive, itself seems suspended) .
All o f which i s to
say that i t was History, rather than Hegel,
that was wrong: from
this perspective the dissolution of art into
philosophy implies a
different kind of 'end' of philosophy - its
diffusion and
expansion into all the realms of social life in such
8 1
a way that it is no
longer a separate discipline but the very air
we breathe and the
very substance of the public sphere itself
and of the
collectivity. It ends, in other words, not by becoming
nothing, but by
becoming everything: the path not taken by
History.
Perhaps in that case
it is worth asking how, according to
Hegel, art itself
should have ended in this triumph, which is also
another kind of end,
of philosophy as such, and which did not
happen. 'Just as art',
Hegel says,3 'has its " before " in nature
and the finite spheres
of life, so too it has an " after" , i.e., a
region which in turn
transcends art's way of apprehending and
representing the
Absolute. For art still has a limit in itself and
thereby passes over
into higher forms of consciousness. This
limitation determines,
after all, the position which we are
accustomed to assign
to art in our contemporary life. For us art
counts no longer as
the highest mode in which truth fashions an
existence for itself
'; and he goes on to evoke the Islamic and
Judaic ban on graven
images, along with Plato's critique of art,
as the historical
motive force for mistrust of figuration which
will fulfil itself in
the 'end of art' . But Hegel's very language
warns us not to take
this formulation too literally either, as
meaning the utter
disappearance of art as such. Indeed, Peter
Burger has written
much of interest, speculating on the types of
decorative artistic
productions (Dutch still lifes, for example)
which Hegel thought
would survive the 'end of art' and furnish
or embellish the
lifeworld of a stage of realized philosophy.
Yet the crucial
sentence suggests something rather different:
'For us art no longer
counts as the highest mode in which truth
fashions an existence
for itself [die
hochste Weise, in welcher
die
Wahrheit sich Existenz verschafft] ,. This is the sentence that
alerts us to a
reversal of Hegel's judgment by History which is
as dramatic as the one
Adorno's dictum underscored for philosophy
itself: for surely
what has defined modernism in the arts
above all is that it
laid peremptory claim to a unique mode 'of
apprehending and
representing the Absolute' and that it was
indeed for us or at
least wished to be for us par excellence 'the
highest mode in which
truth claws its way into existence' (to
give a somewhat
different rendering) . Modernism very precisely
found its authority in
the relativization of the various philosoph-
82
ical codes and
languages, in their humiliation by the development
of the natural
sciences, and in the intensifying critiques of
abstraction and
instrumental reason inspired by the experiences
of the industrial
city.
But the ways in which
the authority of philosophy was
weakened and
undermined cannot be said to have simply
allowed art to develop
and persist alongside it, as some alternative
path to an Absolute
whose questionable authority remained
intact. In this sense
Hegel was absolutely right: an event took
place, the event he
planned to call 'the end of art'. And as a
constitutive feature
of that event, in fact a certain art ended.
What did not conform
to Hegel's prognosis was the supersession
of art by philosophy
itself: rather, a new and different kind of
art suddenly appeared
to take philosophy's place after the end
of the old one, and to
usurp all of philosophy's claims to the
Absolute, to being the
'highest mode in which truth manages to
come into being'. This
was the art we call modernism: and it
means that in order to
account for Hegel's mistake, we need to
posit two kinds of art
with wholly different functions and claims
on truth.
Or rather, we do not
need to, because those two types of art
had already been
theorized and codified in Hegel's day, and we
have already commented
on the rather suspicious nature of his
dealings with the
theory in question, which as you will already
have guessed is that
of the distinction between the Beautiful and
the Sublime. I agree
with any number of commentators - but
perhaps Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe has put it most strongly -
that what we call
modernism is in the long run to be identified
with the Sublime
itself. Modernism aspires to the Sublime as to
its very essence,
which we may call trans-aesthetic, insofar as it
lays a claim to the
Absolute, that is, it believes that in order to
be art at all, art
must be something beyond art. Kant's account
- a peculiar
afterthought and codicil to his more conventional
thoughts on Beauty -
amounts to an extraordinary premonition
of modern art in a
period in which little enough else foreshadowed
it, and might
fruitfully be re-explored for its implications
for both the
philosophical (he calls it 'moral') and the effective
dimensions of the
modern generally. That is unfortunately not
something we can
pursue any further here, where it is rather a
8 3
somewhat different
consequence that must be underscored:
namely that the art
whose 'end' Hegel foresaw is, in the light of
Kant, to be identified
as Beauty. It is the Beautiful that comes to
an end in this
significant event, but what takes its place is finally
not philosophy, as
Hegel thought, but rather the Sublime itself,
or in other words the
aesthetic of the modern or the transaesthetic
if you prefer. And of
course, very much in the spirit of Peter
Biirger's suggestion,
this supersession is accompanied by a lowlevel
persistence and
reproduction of any number of secondary
forms of the Beautiful
in all the traditional senses; the Beautiful
now as decoration,
without any claim to truth or to a special
relationship with the
Absolute.
But if you have been
willing to go this far, perhaps you will
be prepared to take
another step further, or rather a leap, into
our own time, or
rather our own yesterday, of the 1 960s and
the happenings, and
that particular contemporary 'end of art',
to which it is time to
return. Now, however, I think that we are
in a better position
to identify this particular 'end of something':
it can only be the end
of the modern itself, or in other words
the end of the
Sublime, the dissolution of art's vocation to reach
the Absolute. It
should be clear, then, that whatever this
particular historical
event is, it will scarcely present much
similarity to that
older and earlier 'end of art' in which
philosophy failed to
live up to its historic vocation, and in
which it was left to
the Sublime to supplant the merely Beautiful.
The end of the modern,
the gradual setting in place of postmodernity
over several decades,
has been an epochal event in its
own right whose
changing and shifting evaluations merit some
study in themselves.
I was going to say,
for example, that this second 'end of art'
was scarcely to be
imagined as having opened the way to the
final realm of
philosophy any more than its very different
nineteenth-century
equivalent had. But if you think of the
dissolution of the
modern as a lengthy cultural process, which
began in the 1 960s,
and whose 1 9 80s' unveiling as a new gilded
age does not perhaps
give us its final word either, then other
conjectures and
historical interpretations seem possible as well.
What for example of
the emergence of Theory, as that seemed
to supplant traditional
literature from the 1960s onwards, and
84
to extend across a
broad range of disciplines, from philosophy
to anthropology, from
linguistics to sociology, effacing their
boundaries in an
immense dedifferentiation and inaugurating
that long-postponed
moment as well in which a Marxism that
had established its
credentials as an analysis of political economy
finally earned its
right to new ones in the analysis of
superstructures, of
culture and ideology? This grand moment of
Theory (which some
claim now also to have ended) in fact
confirmed Hegel's
premonitions by taking as its central theme
the dynamics of
representation itself: one cannot imagine a
classical Hegelian
supersession of art by philosophy otherwise
than by just such a
return of consciousness (and self-consciousness)
back on the figuration
and the figural dynamics that
constitute the
aesthetic, in order to dissolve those into the broad
daylight and
transparency of praxis itself. The 'end of art' of
this period, the
waning of the modern, was not merely marked
by the slow disappearance of all the great auteurs who signed
modernism in its
grandest period from 1 9 1 0 to 1 955; it was
also accompanied by
the emergence of all those now equally
famous names from
Levi-Strauss to Lacan, from Barthes to
Derrida and
Baudrillard, that adorn the heroic age of Theory
itself. The transition
was not characterized by an abrupt shifting
of gears, in which a
preoccupation with the narrative sublime,
for example, suddenly
gave way jarringly to a return to the
study of logical
categories: rather Theory emerged from the
aesthetic itself, from
the culture of the modern, and it is only in
the dreary light of,
the old anti-intellectual distinction between
the critical and the
creative that the movement from Mayakovsky
to Jakobson will seem
a downward curve, or that from
Brecht to Barthes, or
from Joyce to Eco, from Proust to Deleuze.
In these senses, then,
and with the significant replacement of
the term philosophy by
that of theory, perhaps it might be
argued, about this particular
contemporary 'end of art', that
Hegel was not so
terribly wrong after all; and that the event in
question could at
least partially be grasped as a dissolution of
figuration at its most
intense into a newer form of lucidity
which unlike the older
philosophical system now attempted to
make a place for
praxis itself.
If so, however, then
the description is only partially correct,
85
and the setting in
place of the postmodern also has another
dimension to which we
have not yet done justice. For Hegel's
transitional schema
involves the fate of several terms: the
function of the
Sublime, the modern, of the one half of art, is
taken over by Theory;
but this also leaves room for the survival
of art's other half,
namely the Beautiful, which now invests the
cultural realm at the
moment in which the production of the
modern has gradually
dried up. This is the other face of
postmodernity, the
return of Beauty and the decorative, in the
place of the older
modern Sublime, the abandonment by art of
the quest for the
Absolute or of truth claims and its redefinition
as a source of sheer
pleasure and gratification (rather than, as in
the modern, of jouissance) . Both Theory and the Beautiful are
constituent elements
of that 'end of art' which was the postmodern:
but they tend to block
each other out in such a way that
the seventies appeared
to be the age of Theory, where the
eighties revealed
itself as the moment of garish cultural selfindulgence
and consumption (which
began indeed to include
signed and commodified
Theory itself in its lavish feasts) .
Art thus, in this new
age, seems t o have sunk back t o the
older culinary status
it enjoyed before the dominance of the
Sublime: yet we must
remember that in those days, which are
still largely filled
with the processes of secularization and with
the replacement of a
feudal or cultic ancien regime culture with
a bourgeois one, the
field of culture is still shared by even more
ancient forms of
religious figuration, which have in our own
time utterly vanished
as such. We must therefore add a significant
qualification to this
identification to postmodernism with
Kant's and Burke's
conception of the Beautiful: this has to do
with education, the
public sphere, and the cybernetic or informational
age; and it requires
us to underscore a remarkable
historic development
in our own time, namely the immense
expansion of culture
and commodification into all these fields -
politics and
economics, for example - from which it was so
rightly differentiated
in the daily life of the modern period. The
great movement of
dedifferentiation of postmodernity has in
other words once again
effaced these boundaries (and, as has
been said, makes the
cultural economic at the same time that it
turns the economic
into so many forms of culture) . This is why
8 6
it seems appropriate
to evoke an immense acculturation of daily
life and the social
generally in our own postmodern moment;
and also what
justifies prophetic descriptions of our society as
the society of the
spectacle or of the image - for I would want
to argue more
generally that this acculturation has taken
essentially spatial
forms which we tend, crudely and not
altogether accurately,
to identify as visual. This is not the
position generally
held, I think, by those who either deplore or
celebrate 'an end of
art' identified with the end of literature, the
canon, or reading as
such, and superseded by mass culture in
general - a
non-Hegelian and moralizing position which generally
fails to describe the
new moment in a systemic way. But the
return of the
Beautiful in the postmodern must be seen as just
such a systemic
dominant: a colonization of reality generally by
spatial and visual
forms which is at one and the same time a
commodification of
that same intensively colonized reality on a
world-wide scale.
Whether the Sublime, and its successor
Theory, have that
capacity hinted at by Kant, to restore the
philosophical
component of such postmodernity, and to crack
open the
comQ,lodification implicit in the Beautiful, is a question
I have not even begun
to explore; but it is a question and a
problem which is, I
hope, a little different from the alternative
we have thought we
were faced with until now: namely whether,
if you prefer
modernism, it is conceivable, let alone possible, to
go back to the modern
as such, after its dissolution into full
postmodernity: And the
new question is also a question about
Theory itself, and
whether it can persist and flourish without
simply turning back
into an older technical philosophy whose
limits and
obsolescence were already visible in the nineteenth
century.
But now we need to
move on to an even more complicated
topic - one that
turns, not merely on the end of art, but
seemingly, on the end
of everything; namely the so-called 'end
of history' itself. We
have unfortunately no time to retrace the
fascinating story of
this motif: which originates in a certain
'epochality' in Hegel,
his sense that a whole new unparalleled
era was beginning;
which is then readapted by the Russian
emigre Alexandre
Kojeve - an admirer of Stalin and later on an
architect of the
European Common Market and the European
8 7
Economic Community,
whose 1 930s lectures on Hegel are often
credited as the source
for what came to be called 'existential
Marxism'; finally, the
version of 'the idea with which [Francis]
Fukuyama startled the
world's j ournalists in the summer of
19 89', as Perry
Anderson puts it - in short, the notion that at
the end of the Cold
War capitalism and the market could be
declared the final
form of human history itself, a notion to
which piquancy was
added by the position of Fukuyama in
George Bush's State
Department. Fortunately, however, the
history of this
concept has been written as definitively as anyone
might now wish, in
Anderson's book A
Zone of Engagement,4
so that we do not have
to review the details here, as entertaining
as that might be.
Two features of the
story need to be retained, however, and
both relate to
historical materialism. Those conversant with a
materialist and
dialectical interpretation of history will for one
thing not be likely to
make the more naive objection to
Fukuyama, namely that,
in spite of everything, history does go
on, there continue to
be events and in particular wars, nothing
seems to have stopped,
everything seems to be getting worse,
etc., etc. But insofar
as Marx evoked his version of the end of
history at all, it was
with two qualifications: first, he spoke not
of the end of history,
but of the end of prehistory; that is to say,
of the arrival of a
period in which the human collectivity is in
control of its own
destiny, in which history is a form of
collective praxis, and
no longer subject to the non-human
determinisms either of
nature and scarcity, or of the market and
money. And, second, he
imagined this end of prehistory not in
terms of events or
individual actions but in terms of systems or
better still (his
word) modes of production. (Nor did he teach
the inevitability of
any particular outcome; a famous phrase
evokes the possibility
of 'the mutual ruin of the contending
classes' - a rather different
end of history, surely - while the
equally famous
alternative of 'socialism or barbarism' obviously
includes a fateful
warning and an appeal to human freedom.)
Still, the Marxist
view, that of the supersession of one mode of
production by another,
by insisting on radical difference
between that kind of
systemic event and those events which are
more ordinary
historical actions or happenings, makes it clear
8 8
how history would be
expected to continue eventfully even after
the radical change of
socio-economic systems or modes of
production themselves.
Oddly enough, however,
neither Fukuyama nor Kojeve argue
for their ends of
history in that historical-materialist or systemic
way: indeed for people
accustomed to the more materialist
Hegel of the early
Jena economic writings or of the Hegel taken
up into Marx himself,
they serve as a useful reminder of another
basically idealist (if
not necessarily conservative) side of Hegel
(and perhaps even of
existential Marxism) , namely that which,
via the struggle
between master and slave, insists on the motor
of history as a
struggle for recognition. Kojeve's insistence on
the Hegelian motif of
'satisfaction' (
Befriedigung), his consequent
(almost Girardian)
emphasis on the results of social
equality and the end
of hierarchy, turn the triumph of capitalism
back into social
psychology and existentialism rather than the
superiority of the
mode of production itself. Later theorists
combine 'the two
motifs that Kojeve had opposed as alternatives:
no longer a civilisation
of either consumption or style, but
of their
inten:hangeability - the dance of commodities as bal
masque
of libidinal intensities' .5 But
Fukuyama's identification
of democratic
institutions and the market, scarcely an original
one even in itself,
returns us to social psychology and may stand
as a challenge to
contemporary or postmodern, late-capitalist
Marxism to work up a
properly materialist analysis of commodity
consumption as well as
of the group rivalries of the struggle
for recognition consumerism and ethnic civil wars - which
together characterize
our own particular era. Marxist theory
needs to provide
interpretations of all these things - of ideology
and class struggle, of
culture and the operation of the superstructures
- on the vaster scale
of contemporary globalization.
The spirit of the
analyses will have a continuity with the older
ones, so triumphantly
elaborated at the end of the modern
period: but the terms
will necessarily be new and fresh, given
the novelties of the
enlarged capitalist world market which they
are designed to
explain.
I believe, however,
that the historical significance of Fukuyama's
essay is not really to
be found in Hegel or Kojeve, even
though I also think we
have something to learn from them:
89
namely, a relationship
to our own present which I will call
'epochality' and by
way of which we defend the historical
meaning and
significance of the present moment and the present
age against all claims
of the past and the future. And this is all
the more significant a
lesson given the splendours of the
preceding period of
modernity against which we find it so
difficult to defend
ourselves, preferring to ward off the
unpleasant feeling of
being epigones by means of sheer historical
amnesia and the
stifling of the sense of history itself. To work
out a relationship to
the modern which neither amounts to a
nostalgic call to
return to it nor an oedipal denunciation of its
repressive
insufficiencies - this is a rich mission for our historicity,
and success in it
might help us to recover some sense of the
future as well as of
the possibilities of genuine change.
But the usefulness of
Fukuyama does not lie in that particular
direction, I think:
rather it is to be found by juxtaposition with
another influential
American essay that appeared almost exactly
one hundred years
earlier, in 1 8 93, and which equally spelled
out the end of
something. This is to suggest that, despite the
appearances,
Fukuyama's 'end of history' is not really about
Time at all, but
rather about Space; and that the anxieties it so
powerfully invests and
expresses, to which it gives such usable
figuration, are not
unconscious worries about the future or
about Time: they
express the feeling of the constriction of Space
in the new world
system; they bespeak the closing of another
and more fundamental
frontier in the new world market of
globalization and of
the transnational corporations. Frederick
Jackson Turner's
famous essay, 'The Frontier in American
History',6 is thus a
better analogy; and the impossibility to
imagine a future to
which Fukuyama's conception of the 'end
of history' gives
voice is the result of new and more fundamental
spatial limits, not as
a result of the end of the Cold War or of
the failure of
socialism, as rather of the entrance of capitalism
into a new third stage
and its consequent penetration of as yet
uncommodified parts of
the world which make it difficult to
imagine any further
enlargement of the system. As far as
socialism is
concerned, a different Marx (that of the Grundrisse
rather than that of Capital ) always insisted that it would not be
on the agenda until
the world market had reached its limits and
90
things and labour
power became universally commodified. We
are today far closer
to that situation than in the time of either
Marx or Lenin.
But the notion of the
'end of history' also expresses a blockage
of the historical
imagination, and we need to see more clearly
how that is so, and
how it ends up seeming to offer only this
particular concept as
a viable alternative. It seems to me
particularly
significant that the emergence of late capitalism (or
in other words of a
third stage of capitalism) , along with the
consequent collapse of
the communist systems in the East,
coincided with a
generalized and planetary ecological disaster.
It is not particularly
the rise of the ecological movements that I
have in mind here
(despite the environmental excesses of Soviet
forced modernization,
the measures demanded by any consequent
ecological movement
could surely only be enforced by a
strong socialist
government) ; rather, it is the end of a Promethean
conception of
production that seems to me significant, in
the way in which it
makes it difficult for people today to
continue to imagine
development as a conquest of nature. At
the when the market
suffuses the world, in other
words, and penetrates
the hitherto uncommodified zones of
former colonies,
further development becomes unthinkable on
account of a general ( and quite justified) turn away from
the
older heroic forms of
productivity and extraction. At the
moment, in other
words, when the limits of the globe are
reached, notions of
intensive development become impossible
to contemplate; the
end of expansion and old-fashioned imperialism
is not accompanied by
any viable alternative of internal
development.
Meanwhile, the second
feature of the new situation that
blocks our imagination
of the future, lies in its sheer systematicity:
in the way in which,
with the cybernetic and informational
revolutions and their
consequences for marketing and finance,
the entire world is
suddenly sewn up into a total system from
which no one can
secede. It is enough to think of Samir Amin's
suggestive term
'delinking' - opting out of the world system -
to measure the
resistance of our imaginations to this possibility.
These two blocks, then
- the taboo on Prometheanism and
on the value of
intensive development and industrialization; the
91
impossibility of
imagining a secession from the new world
system and a political
and social, as well as economic, delinking
from it - these
spatial dilemmas are what immobilize our
imaginative picture of
global space today, and conjure up as
their sequel the
vision that Fukuyama calls the 'end of history',
and the final triumph
of the market as such. Turner's pronouncement
about the closing of
the frontier still offered the
possibility of an
imperialist expansion beyond the borders of
the now saturated
continental United States; Fukuyama 's prophecy
expresses the
impossibility of imagining an equivalent for
that safety valve, nor
even of an intensive turn back inside the
system either, and
this is why it was so powerful an ideologeme,
an ideological
expression and representation of our current
dilemmas. How the
various 'ends of art' are now to be coordinated
philosophically and
theoretically with this new 'closing'
of the global frontier
of capitalism is our more fundamental
question, and the
horizon of all literary and cultural study in
our time. This, with
which I now have to end, is where we
ought to begin.
