The first half of the twentieth century--especially its middle three decades--was the heyday of high modernism. Until the end of that period, the concept of culture in today's neutral ethnological sense was all but unknown. Instead and to a quite astonishing degree, Western thinking tended to differentiate societies in terms of race. Even the differences between European countries were typically given racial explanations, with fine shadings of "ethnic stock" called in to justify any number of variations in national temperament.

Insofar as there was, nonetheless, an undoubted understanding of the decisive role of transmissible information within a society, it tended to be treated within an evolutionary construct. Culture was something that some peoples had more of than others; technological stasis was equated with social stasis and a correspondingly "low" level of cultural development. "Primitive" peoples were those that hadn't changed much since their inception, and were therefore regarded as preservations of the oldest strata, yet at the same time young because of the absence of an antecedent arc of historical change. Similarly, ancient societies were regarded as lying closer than us to a much-discussed "primitive social state."

It's hard for anyone who hasn't read extensively from the social and humanistic writings of the time to believe how pervasive those attitudes were, such a long, short while ago. Subsequent rethinkings have quite justifiably rejected them in the strongest terms. Human "race" is largely a myth, cobbled together from ethnic divisions that don't divide along the lines of perceived racial groupings, are not stable over time, and have limited biological importance, genetic diversity being primarily within, and not between, ethnic groups. Most of what had been explained by racial divisions is actually due to differential cultural transmission. All cultures change over time, even when their technologies are fairly static. And social development stretches so far into the past, for every culture, that none can be considered young or old. No primitive social state can be found; each culture has antecedent stages so numerous and varied that the cultures of ancient times were for all intents and purposes as much the product of an evolution, however unrecoverable, as our own. Cultural change is in no way confined to any pre-given linear pattern; and language, the decisive distinguishing trait of humankind, achieves the same degree of grammatical sophistication in every single culture, from hunter-gatherer to post-industrialist--its features in no way predictable from technological level.

The advance in understanding has been profound enough to give the now-prevalent tendency to dismiss modernist theory a ready excuse. Yet ideas from that era, however often they are rebutted, keep flaring up, serving as touchstones of a remarkably large portion of today's farthest-ranging debates, stretching from the still-echoing clashes of sharply defined artistic and literary schools to the surprising resonance of the Freud/Jung/Adler split with divisions in contemporary feminism, from the radical reductions of logical positivism to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, from repressed childhood memories to doublethink, from formalism to Newspeak, encompassing practically every basic concept of cultural anthropology, and even extending to the 1930's biological synthesis, along with fundamental debates in logic, mathematics, and physics that have since been refined but whose open-ended urgency has never been matched.

If modernist texts remain so pivotal, it's because they raise possibilities people now fear to approach except at a level of remove. Whatever modernist theory may, putatively or actually, have lacked in rigor, it had a fertility and devotion to foundational issues we are sorely wanting. In sharp contrast with the unearned irony and denigration of language that permeate today's zeitgeist, modernists took symbols seriously--theory still more so. Myth and metaphor likewise loomed large for them, for, seeking linkages across gulfs of time and space that today's far more "connected" world seldom attempts except through the most flaccid humanist platitudes, they perceived their world as ordered by a single symbolic system. In this way modernists were no different from people since time immemorial--except that they saw those symbols slipping, the net of signifiers that had previously grounded Western society becoming relativized and even dismembered, opening up dizzying new spaces. But however far the net might slip, it had no alternative. If modernists thought in evolutionary terms, it was not only because of their chauvinism, but because doing so allowed them to place other societies within a common temporal framework: for there could be but one. "Primitivism," in all its manifestations, was appropriated, juxtaposed with the latest experiments in Western surrealism, because it could only be there. There was no separate space.

The predominant modernist outlook slowly shifted in the fifties, sixties, and seventies under a barrage of critiques. A new version, anti-racist and culturally informed, which I will designate late modernism, developed side by side with a tendency that although deeply indebted to modernist thought turned drastically away from both its structural unitarianism and its theoretical ambitions. The latter is widely known as postmodernism, though the term is often used far more indiscriminately. Indeed the two tendencies became so confused, despite their sharp differences, that what is called poststructuralism,²⁹ commonly treated as almost a single school, in fact contains elements of both--Lacan, Barthes, and Althusser advancing late modernisms, with Derrida and, more equivocally, Foucault tending towards postmodernism.

Of course labels of this kind must be applied with caution, lest they become an excuse to ignore the specificity of a theorist's articulation; but the distinction itself has nothing fuzzy about it. Postmodernism is both highly theoretical and anti-theoretical; all formulations, all systems are to be undermined--even the author's own. While late modernists also at times undercut their own statements, the purpose is to dialectize and extend them, not to make of underminedness a universal status; late modernism very much shares the modernist aspiration of theory building, though it engages the task with a hard-won awareness of its limitations. In particular, where modernists expected one theory to solve everything, spurring endless bitter wars between rival theoretical schools, late modernists recognize that even a universally applicable theory does not say everything valid about its referents--hence the need for multiple intersecting approaches. The subtlety of this distinction is lost in postmodernism's supposedly more radical outright rejection of all-applicability, and its concomitant preference for fragmentation over intersection.

With their tactic of putting everything into question, postmodernists have become the perfect objectivist bogeyman. But ironically, by relativizing all theories and rejecting a definitive status for any, they have also cleared objectivism's way. Nothing is easier than rallying people against theories that are not only incomprehensible to most but seem to inspire no passionate commitments even among those who use them. To undermine everything is ultimately to affirm nothing. But many postmodernists have gone further, espousing a surprisingly pragmatist anti-theoreticism on the grounds that all system, even all representation, is unsound or repressive. In this sense, postmodernists and objectivists not only need each other as ideal enemies with which to rouse their respective supporters, but are partners in a shared project of theoretic destruction.

It seems the cultural winds have blown in the postmodern direction--especially here. It's no coincidence that in America, where the anti-modern turn is more extreme than in Europe, Derrida and Foucault have been far and away the most influential "poststructuralists." But the phenomenon is not limited to the self-consciously intellectual; academic, political, and popular trend-setters, for all the ostentatious difference of their vehicles, have driven in tandem down the same no-through street.³⁰ Postmodern youth culture--characterized by a segmented social vision, cynicism without rebellion, a belief in universal selfishness as an ineluctable fate, impotently sympathetic recognition of the underdog's plight, the cultivation of fakery as an art form, ideological nihilism, and pervasive post-apocalyptic motifs--has since the late eighties permeated not only music and movies but the everyday fabric of social life.

The postmodern trend has inaugurated a pervasive discourse about the deconstruction of master signifiers--Big Words like essence, nature, and origins, and markers of authority from "God, family, and country" to royal seals to IBM. In showing their hollowness of content and the myriad occupants who are capable of ascending the same throne, postmodernists have not succeeded in the least disruption of the power of those who occupy places of mastery. In fact, it must be said that the latter are in their debt. Nothing is more freeing for a king--and less so for everyone else--than to learn that he is no longer expected to be regal. If the crown is an emblem of raw power guaranteeing not even a pretense of restraint, and every sophisticated subject knows it, the king will exercise none, all the while purring to the remaining naifs that he is behaving exactly as a king must--to question which is treason. The postmoderns thus end up fingered as traitors by a tyranny they helped to create, with the naifs serving as informants. Such a scenario is too present and familiar to American readers to need further elaboration.

Indeed, the backlash against deconstruction has been a double success, drawing people with progressive leanings into the politically untenable position of defending the supposed dismantling of master signifiers, while simultaneously distracting them from the effectiveness of their continued operation. Until the last few years awakened them to their danger, most liberals seemed to think master signifiers a fading relic that could simply be bypassed through a sufficiently inclusive multicultural diversity. The goal was to treat each culture as an autonomous encampment, with none in a dominant position.

But this vision requires a universal plain on which they can all camp out. The very concept of inclusion implies simultaneous coexistence and mutual awareness, which in turn necessitates an all-encompassing comparative space, however abstract. Multicultural "relativism," then, turns out to be a particularly rigid form of universalism. Not only does it logically require the very God's-eye perspective it so stridently disclaims, the result is impossible to dialectize, since any critique would inevitably impinge on someone's self-determination. Instead, each culture is left frozen and autonomous within the invisible container of universal tolerance.³¹

But who came up with universal tolerance? Certainly not the cultures it's supposed to shield. Far from a neutral value, it has the effect of allowing every culture to exist, but only so long as none of them matters--for if they were allowed to set standards and impose their strictures as all real cultures do, their simultaneous equality would be impossible. Real cultures may "coexist," that is, work out arrangements with their neighbors, and may borrow from each other at will, but each within its own domain exercises an unequivocal and coercive preeminence.

The study of culture has shown, in fact, that any one culture covers the totality of meanings, leaving no space for alternatives. While it's true that some meanings that are important in one culture make no sense in another, that's only because their possibility is excluded outright by the latter: no gap is to be found there. A culture, taken as a whole, has no gaps, because only in reference to its total field, ultimately identical with language, can gaps be defined.³²

For example, a polytheist culture never exposed to monotheist influence (as used to exist all over the world) probably does not lack monotheism: in all likelihood, the possibility of monotheism is simply not marked out within its structure. Only if monotheism, or its rejection, were hidden within the folds of the polytheist discourse itself would its lack be an issue therein.

Cultural plurality means that gapless fields of meaning come in many varieties--which can in no way stand side by side. The physical coexistence of different cultures masks their profound incompatibility. Even people who live in a bicultural world, who go daily from one to the other, must in monocultural settings bow entirely to their neighbors' expectations, which may well encompass other cultures as disparaged terms. And those who remain inside a culture do not perceive it as arbitrary, any more than speakers engrossed in conversation perceive their native language's grammar as arbitrary. They are right not to. For any one culture, however hybrid in origin, is a total world.³³

Late modernism accepts this totalization and dialectizes it from within. One's culture is not a particularism; rather, it is one's only access to the universal. When we analyze and compare other cultures, it is not a failure but a necessity that we still speak from within our own. The fractured world of symbol and myth is where we live; "cultural constructedness" is not a vanity to be derided but the human destiny par excellence. One can cross from one culture to another, but there is no cross-cultural space; one always finds oneself enmeshed in a single, all-inclusive framework within which its subjects' lives are ordered.

Any such framework is held together by master signifiers, arbitrary for those who dwell outside it, insuperable within it. Even when we talk about another culture which lacks some of these pole-stars of our existence, we inevitably, unwittingly make use of them. And even revolution, replacing them with a new set, cannot hope to do without them. Rather than trying to deconstruct master signifiers, modernist poets, mythologists, and theorists played with them, understanding their contrived, even gamelike character, and at the same time their inherently privileged place. To show the symbolic truth behind the biological or religious trappings is no debunking: symbols, in their own way, are just as strong as DNA.

The beyond of culturalism and the beyond of modernism are the same: a direction already clearly marked when the wrong turn was taken. Late modernists were starting to unravel, not the supposedly contingent designation of master signifiers, but our contingent relation to them, before their message was drowned under a tidal wave of revanchist propaganda--with the ironic assistance of the New Left’s 1970’s turn, which increasingly replaced the banner, "Don’t let them rule you," with "Don’t let them represent you." After a fateful mismatch between discursive and material conditions allowed insurrectional discourses to reach a late-sixties tipping point without revolution occurring,³⁴ "personal discovery" became a code-word for continuing the discursive revolution shorn of its political pretenses, and the right to define oneself outside of the established signifying system became a substitute for the demand that it be overturned.³⁵ An insistence on thwarting the representations of master signifiers--conceived as dead weights, oppressive in themselves--drove erstwhile rebels to view any experimentation with them as a reactionary act. So began a paradoxical anti-modernism that, taken as a self-liberation, has spread far beyond the left--with little resistance, and for good reason, from those who wield these signifiers to their advantage.

The rejection of master signifiers--subsequently radicalized by the general post-Cold-War breakdown of principled distinctions--powerfully reinforced the illusion, irrelevant to capitalist production but essential to its propaganda, that the individual stands self-sufficient above all symbolic restraint. It also paved the way for a proliferation of social groupings purportedly independent of any common allegiance. But if seventies-style personalism complete with designer subcultures and matching identities has turned into a dead end only Prozac can make bearable, it remains true that we cannot go back to the culturally single world history of modernism, nor pretend that one discourse constitutes an Archimedean point under which all others can be subsumed.

But any perspective of all-encompassing relativism is itself merely a disguised Archimedean point. To truly escape such points means accepting the contingency of our places in the world, governed by histories that encompass our lives but extend far beyond and before them. Yet it does not follow that all action merely expresses where the actor is coming from, for that eminently postmodern position misses precisely what objectivists most compulsively deny: that what determines my act is not so much what conditions me as what conditions the desire I act upon, a desire whose meaning cannot be pinned down in advance--not where I'm coming from but where I'm going to.

I myself cannot predict where this lure will take me. Yet far from a reason to consider my actions eternally provisional, their chance-dependence is what I must fatefully embrace to make them hit home. This is precisely where my freedom becomes possible--when I take upon myself like an inherited obligation the circumstances that impel me, however far they are beyond my power, or indeed against my will. Only then can I unreservedly avow my response to them as my own, asserting my freedom even if in the very act of affirming that my principles leave me with no choice.

All the paradoxes arising from the concept of "free will" stem from the wish to say, "But I could just as well have done something else"--a statement motivated by the will to stand above the concrete fortunes of life, the fear to embrace them in midstream--in other words, the very fear of freedom. Those who keep aloof from the contingencies that bond them to life and language are condemned to wander from discourse to discourse, unable to use their terms as anything but exit passes. As Jacques Lacan titled one of his seminars, the non-dupes go astray.³⁶

The dupes of a discourse, on the other hand, move within a self-enclosing circuit. All the squabbles that are internal to a discourse leave untouched the shared assumptions by which it is anchored. These can be critiqued, not through a "critical distance" which inevitably objectifies the discourse from behind a smokescreen of "neutrality" or sophistication, but when--as in this essay--someone speaking as the dupe of one discourse articulates weaknesses verifiable within another.

The task of theory is not to avoid being dupes, nor to acknowledge a dupedom we hold ironically at arm's length. It is rather to be language's willing fools, accepting our ineluctable fate as enactors of discourse. The discovery of the endless structural circularity of language has led postmodernists to forget that to speak has nothing circular about it: it is an irreversible, unrepeatable act within an ongoing drama. The modernist gamble was to stake life itself on the chance of gaining recognition for this act, entering freely into a theater of words with self-divided players strewn across a stage at once shabby and rich with meaning. For discourse is a labor in which meaning is always born, even if from a womb of nonsense.

Failing to understand that recognition can be achieved only inside a specific discourse, today's most prevalent form of multiculturalism operates under the pretense of granting all discourses equal standing from a position--never clarified because it is impossible--of universal recognition. Correctly perceiving the lack of connection among the various discourses it seeks to bring together under the roof of diversity, it is compelled to treat their disconnectedness as a real phenomenon--hence the endless platitudes about how we live in an inherently fragmented world. Once it is understood that no such outer roof exists--that it is impossible to talk about diversity except as a contingent phenomenon of real social contact--theory reawakens at the precise place where its articulation uncovers a fault-line within one of the familiar discourses that sponsor its social existence.

The perspective of the new modernism must be the ability to encompass a coherent world of universal import from any such position--just as the principle of relativity in physics is the perfect adequacy, indifferent to apparent contradiction, of each located observer.