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Philosophy and Literature, Volume 25, Number 1, April 2001, pp. 1-13
(Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/phl.2001.0011

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 Ihab Hassan 1

Ihab Hassan

FROM POSTMODERNISM TO POSTMODERNITY:

THE LOCAL/GLOBAL CONTEXT

W HAT W AS P OSTMODERNISM ? What was postmodernism, and what is it

still? I believe it is a revenant, the return of the irrepressible; every
time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back. Like a ghost, it eludes
definition. Certainly, I know less about postmodernism today than I did
thirty years ago, when I began to write about it. This may be because
postmodernism has changed, I have changed, the world has changed.
But this is only to confirm Nietzsche’s insight, that if an idea has a
history, it is already an interpretation, subject to future revision. What
escapes interpretation and reinterpretation is a Platonic Idea or an
abstract analytical concept, like a circle or a triangle. Romanticism,
modernism, postmodernism, however, like humanism or realism, will
shift and slide continually with time, particularly in an age of ideologi-
cal conflict and media hype.
All this has not prevented postmodernism from haunting the dis-
course of architecture, the arts, the humanities, the social and some-
times even the physical sciences; haunting not only academic but also
public speech in business, politics, the media, and entertainment
industries; haunting the language of private life styles like postmodern
cuisine—just add a dash of raspberry vinegar. Yet no consensus obtains
on what postmodernism really means.
The term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to what philoso-
phers call an essentially contested category. That is, in plainer language,
if you put in a room the main discussants of the concept—say Leslie
Fiedler, Charles Jencks, Jean-François Lyotard, Bernard Smith, Rosalind
Krauss, Fredric Jameson, Marjorie Perloff, Linda Hutcheon and, just to

Philosophy and Literature, © 2001, 25: 1–13

2 Philosophy and Literature

add to the confusion, myself—locked the room and threw away the key,
no consensus would emerge between the discussants after a week. But a
thin trickle of blood might appear beneath the sill.
Let us not despair: though we may be unable to define or exorcise
the ghost of postmodernism, we can approach it, surprising it from
various angles, perhaps teasing it into a partial light. In the process, we
may discover a family of words congenial to postmodernism. Here are
some current uses of the term:

1. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Spain), Ashton

Raggatt McDougall’s Storey Hall in Melbourne (Australia), and
Arata Isozaki’s Tsukuba Center (Japan) are considered examples
of postmodern architecture. They depart from the pure angular
geometries of the Bauhaus, the minimal steel and glass boxes of
Mies van der Rohe, mixing aesthetic and historical elements,
flirting with fragments, fantasy, and even kitsch.

2. In a recent encyclical, titled “Fides et Ratio,” Pope John Paul II

actually used the word postmodernism to condemn extreme
relativism in values and beliefs, acute irony and skepticism toward
reason, and the denial of any possibility of truth, human or
divine.

3. In cultural studies, a highly politicized field, the term post-

modernism is often used in opposition to postcolonialism, the
former deemed historically feckless, being unpolitical or, worse,
not politically correct.

4. In Pop culture, postmodernism—or PoMo as Yuppies call it

insouciantly—refers to a wide range of phenomena, from Andy
Warhol to Madonna, from the colossal plaster Mona Lisa I saw
advertising a pachinko parlor in Tokyo to the giant, cardboard
figure of Michelangelo’s David—pink dayglo glasses, canary shorts,
a camera slung across bare, brawny shoulders—advertising KonTiki
Travel in New Zealand.

What do all these have in common? Well, fragments, hybridity,

relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, anti-ideological stance, an
ethos bordering on kitsch and camp. So, we have begun to build a
family of words applying to postmodernism; we have begun to create a
context, if not a definition, for it. More impatient or ambitious readers
can consult Hans Bertens’ The Idea of the Postmodern, the best and fairest
 Ihab Hassan 3

introduction I know to the topic. But now I must make my second move
or feint to approach postmodernism from a different perspective.

II
Postmodernism/Posmodernity. I make this move by distinguishing, as I
did not sufficiently do in my earlier work, between postmodernism and
postmodernity. This is the distinction that constitutes the main thrust of
my argument, and to which I will later return. For the moment, let me
simply say that I mean postmodernism to refer to the cultural sphere,
especially literature, philosophy, and the various arts, including archi-
tecture, while postmodernity refers to the geopolitical scheme, less
order than disorder, which has emerged in the last decades. The latter,
sometimes called postcolonialism, features globalization and localiza-
tion, conjoined in erratic, often lethal, ways.
This distinction is not the defunct Marxist difference between
superstructure and base, since the new economic, political, religious,
and technological forces of the world hardly conform to Marxist “laws.”
Nor does postmodernity equal postcolonialism, though the latter, with
its concern for colonial legacies, may be part of the former.
Think of postmodernity as a world process, by no means identical
everywhere yet global nonetheless. Or think of it as a vast umbrella
under which stand various phenomena: postmodernism in the arts,
poststructuralism in philosophy, feminism in social discourse, post-
colonial and cultural studies in academe, but also multinational capital-
ism, cybertechnologies, international terrorism, assorted separatist,
ethnic, nationalist, and religious movements—all standing under, but
not causally subsumed by, postmodernity.
From what I have said, we can infer two points: first, that post-
modernism (the cultural phenomenon) applies to affluent, high-tech,
consumer, media-driven societies; and second, that postmodernity (the
inclusive geopolitical process) refers to an interactive, planetary phe-
nomenon wherein tribalism and imperialism, myth and technology,
margins and centers—these terms are not parallel—play out their
conflictual energies.
I have said that I did not stress enough the distinction between
postmodernism and postmodernity in my earlier work. But in fairness
to the subject—and perhaps to myself—I should note that an internal
distinction I made within postmodernism itself points to a crucial charac-
teristic of postmodernity in its planetary context. In an essay titled
4 Philosophy and Literature

“Culture, Indeterminacy, and Immanence: Margins of the (Postmodern)

Age,” I coined the term “indetermanence”—that is, indeterminacy
combined with immanence—to describe two disparate tendencies
within postmodernism: that of cultural indeterminacy, on the one
hand, and that of technological immanence, on the other.1 These
tendencies are contrastive rather than dialectical: they ensue in no
Hegelian or Marxist synthesis. (I can think of no one less postmodern
than either.)
By indeterminacy, or better still, indeterminacies, I mean a combina-
tion of trends that include openness, fragmentation, ambiguity, discon-
tinuity, decenterment, heterodoxy, pluralism, deformation, all con-
ducive to indeterminacy or under-determination. The latter concept
alone, deformation, subsumes a dozen current terms like deconstruction,
decreation, disintegration, displacement, difference, discontinuity, dis-
junction, disappearance, de-definition, demystification, detotalization,
delegitimation, decolonization. Through all these concepts moves a
vast will to undoing, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the
erotic body, the individual psyche, the entire realm of discourse in the
West. In literature alone, our ideas of author, audience, reading,
writing, book, genre, critical theory, and of literature itself, have all
suddenly become questionable—questionable but far from invalid, reconsti-
tuting themselves in various ways.
These uncertainties or indeterminacies, however, are also dispersed
or disseminated by the fluent imperium of technology. Thus I call the
second major tendency of postmodernism immanences, a term that I
employ without religious echo to designate the capacity of mind to
generalize itself in symbols, intervene more and more into nature, act
through its own abstractions, and project human consciousness to the
edges of the cosmos. This mental tendency may be further described by
words like diffusion, dissemination, projection, interplay, communica-
tion, which all derive from the emergence of human beings as language
animals, homo pictor or homo significans, creatures constituting them-
selves, and also their universe, by symbols of their own making. Call it
gnostic textualism, if you must. Meanwhile, the public world dissolves as
fact and fiction blend, history becomes a media happening, science
takes its own models as the only accessible reality, cybernetics confronts
us with the enigma of artificial intelligence (Deep Blue contra Kasparov),
and technologies project our perceptions to the edge of matter, within
the atom or at the rim of the expanding universe.
No doubt, these tendencies, I repeat, may seem less prevalent in
 Ihab Hassan 5

some countries than others like America or Australia, Germany or

Japan, where the term postmodernism has become familiar both in and
outside the university. But the fact in most developed societies remains:
as a cultural phenomenon, postmodernism evinces the double ten-
dency I have dubbed “indetermanence.”
The earth, however, is larger and more significant than Planet
Hollywood, Deutsche Bank, or Mitsubishi. Hence the relevance of
Postmodernity. For the indetermanences of cultural postmodernism
seem to have mutated into the local-global conflicts of postmodernity,
including the genocides of Bosnia, Kosovo, Ulster, Rwanda, Chechnya,
Kurdistan, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tibet. . . . At the same time, cultural
postmodernism itself has metastasized into sterile, campy, kitschy, jokey,
dead-end games or sheer media stunts.
Here, then, are some new terms to add to our family of words about
postmodernism: indeterminacy, immanence, textualism, high-tech, con-
sumer, media-driven societies, and all the sub-vocabularies they imply.
Have we nudged the ghost of postmodernism toward the light? Perhaps
we need to nudge it further by raising a different question: isn’t the
statement of this essay, so far, a mark of historical introspection?
Doesn’t it suggest that the postmodern mind inclines to self-apprehen-
sion, self-reflection, as if intent on writing the equivocal autobiography
of an age?

III
The Equivocal Autobiography of an Age. In 1784, Immanuel Kant
published an essay called “Was Ist Aufklärung? ” (“What is Enlighten-
ment?”). Some thinkers, especially Michel Foucault, have taken this
essay to be the first time a philosopher asks self-reflexively: who are we,
historically speaking, and what is the meaning of our contemporaneity?
Certainly, many of us wonder nowadays: Was ist Postmodernismus? But as
Foucault fails to note—he fails in other respects too—we ask the
question without Kant’s confidence in the possibilities of knowledge,
his historical self-assurance.
Children of an equivocal Chronos, versed in aporia, suspicion,
incredulity, votaries of decenterment and apostles of multiplicity,
pluralist, parodic, pragmatic, and polychronic, we could hardly privi-
lege postmodernism as Kant privileged the Enlightenment. Instead, we
betray an abandon of belatedness, a seemingly limitless anxiety of self-
nomination. Hence the weird terms and nomenclatures surrounding
6 Philosophy and Literature

postmodernism, terms like classical postmodernism, high, pop, pomo,

revisionary, deconstructive, reconstructive, insurrectional, pre- and
post-postmodernism—neologisms suggesting an explosion in a word
factory.
In any case, we can hardly imagine any other epoch agonizing so
much about itself, only to devise so clunky a moniker, so awkward a
name as postmodernism. (In this, I share the blame.) Perhaps, after all,
postmodernism can be “defined” as a continuous inquiry into self-
definition. This impulse is by no means restricted to the so-called West.
The more interactive the globe, the more populations move, jostle, and
grapple—this is the age of diasporas—the more questions of cultural,
religious, and personal identity become acute—and sometimes specious.
In still another transposition of postmodernism into postmodernity,
you can hear the cry around the world: “Who are we? Who am I?”
So, once again, here are some more words accruing to our family of
words about postmodernism: historical and epistemic self-reflexivity,
anxiety of self-nomination, a polychronic sense of time (linear, cyclical,
sidereal, cybernetic, nostalgic, eschatological, visionary times are all in
there), massive migrations, forced or free, a crisis of cultural and
personal identities.

IV
Brief History of the Term. This attempt at self-apprehension—what I
called the equivocal autobiography of an age—appears reflected in the
erratic history of the word postmodernism itself, a history, nonetheless,
that helps to clarify the concept currently in use. I must be ruthlessly
selective here, particularly since Charles Jencks and Margaret Rose have
given detailed accounts of that history elsewhere.
It seems that an English salon painter, John Watkins Chapman, used
the term, back in the 1870’s, in the sense that we now speak of Post-
Impressionism. Jump to 1934, when Federico de Onís uses the word
postmodernismo to suggest a reaction against the difficulty and experi-
mentalism of modernist poetry. In 1939, Arnold Toynbee takes up the
term in a very different sense, proclaiming the end of the “modern,”
Western bourgeois order dating back to the seventeenth century. Then,
in 1945, Bernard Smith employs the word to suggest a movement in
painting, beyond abstraction, which we call Socialist Realism. In the
fifties in America, Charles Olson, in conjunction with poets and artists
 Ihab Hassan 7

at Black Mountain College, speaks of a postmodernism that reverts

more to Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams than to formalist
poets like T. S. Eliot. By the end of that decade, in 1959 and 1960, Irving
Howe and Harry Levin, respectively, argue that postmodernism inti-
mates a decline in high modernist culture.
Only in the late sixties and early seventies, in various essays by Leslie
Fiedler and myself, among others, does postmodernism begin to signify
a distinct, sometimes positive, development in American culture, a
critical modification, if not actual end, of modernism. It is in this latter
sense, I believe, changing masks and changing faces, that postmodern
theory persists today.
Why do I make such a seemingly self-serving claim? Consider the
sixties for a moment, all the openings and breaks that occurred in
developed, consumer societies (we are speaking of postmodernism).
Andreas Huyssen called that decade, straddling the sixties and seventies
really, the “great divide.” Within ten or fifteen years, the United States
experienced an astonishing succession of liberation and countercultural
movements: the Berkeley Free Speech, Vietnam Anti-War, Black Power,
Chicano Power, Women’s Lib, Gay Pride, Gray Panther, Psychedelic,
and Ecological Movements, to mention but a few. Street theatre,
happenings, rock music, aleatory composition, concrete poetry, the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, pop art, and multi-media events spread,
blurring the borders of high and popular culture, art and theory, text
and metatext and paratext (my Paracriticism, for instance). Hippies
and Yippies, Flower Children and Minute Men, Encounter Groups and
Zen Monks crowded the landscape. Elitism and hierarchy were out,
participation and anarchy, or at least pseudo-anarchy, were in. The
forms of thought and art shifted from static to performative, from the
hypotactical to paratactical—or so it seemed. Not Heidegger but
Derrida; not Matisse but Duchamp; not Schönberg but Cage; not
Hemingway but Barthelme—and again, most visibly, not Gropius, Mies,
or Le Corbusier, but Gehry, Renzo Piano, and Isozaki in architecture,
among countless others. (Note, however, that postmodernism in the
various arts is not necessarily homologous, as I will later discuss.)
In this climate of cultural “indetermanence” and social “delegiti-
mation” (this latter, Lyotard’s term), postmodernism grew, assuming its
latest guise. Grew and I think died, though its specter still haunts
Europe, America, Australia, Japan . . . you name it.
8 Philosophy and Literature

V
Conceptual Difficulties. The specter can haunt, but it does so ineffectu-
ally; for it is conceptually flawed, and time’s wingless chariot awaits no
one. Since the theoretical difficulties of postmodernism are themselves
revealing, I will mention four of them:
1. The term postmodernism is not only awkward; it is also Oedipal,
and like a rebellious but impotent adolescent, it cannot separate
itself completely from its parent. It cannot invent for itself a new
name like Baroque, Rococo, Romantic, Symbolist, Futurist, Cub-
ist, Dadaist, Surrealist, Constructivist, Vorticist, and so on. In
short, the relation of postmodernism to modernism remains
ambiguous, Oedipal or parasitical if you wish; or as Bernard
Smith remarks in Modernism’s History, it remains a conflictual
“dialogue” with the older movement.
2. The term postmodernism seems very un-postmodern because
postmodern, specifically poststructuralist, thought rejects linear
time, from past to present to future as the prefixes pre- and post-
imply. Postmodern time, I have said, is polychronic. As such, it
avoids categorical and linear periodization: for instance, in En-
glish literary history, that useful and familiar sequence of Elizabe-
than, Jacobean, Neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian, Edwardian,
Modern, Postmodern.
3. More importantly, postmodernism cannot serve simply as a
period, as a temporal, chronological, or diachronic construct; it
must also function as a theoretical, phenomenological, or
synchronic category. Older or dead writers, like Samuel Beckett
or Jorge Luis Borges or Raymond Roussel or Vladimir Nabokov,
can be postmodern, while younger ones, still alive like John
Updike or Toni Morrison or V. S. Naipaul, may not be postmodern
(the distinction carries no literary value judgments). Thus, we
cannot claim that everything before 1960 is modern, everything
after, postmodern. Beckett’s Murphy appeared in 1938, Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake in 1939, both, in my view, preeminently post-
modern. Nor can we simply say that Joyce is modern or post-
modern. Which Joyce? That of Dubliners (premodern), Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man (modern), Ulysses (modern shading into
postmodern), Finnegans Wake (postmodern)?
All this is to say that a persuasive model of postmodernism
 Ihab Hassan 9

requires a constellation of particular styles, features, attitudes,

placed in a particular historical context. Any one of these features
alone—say parody, self-reflection, or black humor—may find
antecedents a hundred or a thousand years ago, in Euripides or
Sterne. But together, in their present historical context, these
features may cohere into a working model of the phenomenon
called postmodernism.

4. Having constructed such a model, does postmodernism develop

along the same lines in every artistic or cultural field? Does it
manifest itself identically in architecture, painting, music, dance,
literature—and in the latter alone, in poetry, fiction, drama, the
essay? What are the correspondences and symmetries, but also
disjunctions and asymmetries, in various artistic genres, indeed in
distinct fields like science, philosophy, politics, popular entertain-
ment? Obviously, the challenges to a comprehensive model of
postmodernism are daunting. Do we need such a model? Do we
still need the word?

VI
Postmodernism as Interpretive Category. At this point, we might as well
ask—whether in Cairo, Sydney, Milwaukee, or Kuala Lumpur—why
bother with postmodernism at all? One answer, I have suggested, is that
postmodernism mutates into postmodernity, which is our global/local
condition. I will shortly return, and indeed conclude, with this theme.
But there is another, more immediate answer: postmodernism has
become, consciously or unconsciously, for better or for worse, an
interpretive category, a hermeneutic tool. As such, it impinges on our
business as students of culture, literature, and the arts.
Why is that? More than a period, more even than a constellation of
artistic trends and styles, postmodernism has become, even after its
partial demise, a way we view the world. Bernard Smith may be right in
saying that postmodernism amounts to little more than a struggle with
the modernist “Formalesque.” But this dialogue or struggle also be-
comes a filter through which we view history, interpret reality, see
ourselves; postmodernism is now our shadow.
Every generation, of course, reinvents its ancestors—this, too, is
hermeneutics. So we look back on Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
(1759–1767) and say, here is an instance, or an antecedent, of
10 Philosophy and Literature

postmodernism. We can say the same of Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1926)
or Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) or James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
(1939). But all this simply means that we have internalized some of the
assumptions and values of postmodernism and that we now reread the
past—indeed, re-appropriate it—in their terms.
This tendency, inevitable perhaps and sometimes enabling, can
become offensive when postmodern ideologies cannibalize the past,
incorporating it wholly into their flesh. Put more equably, we need to
respect the otherness of the past, though we may be condemned to
revise it even as we repeat it. In this, as in literary studies generally,
postmodern theory, at its best, can prove beneficial: it can become a
heightened mode of self-awareness, self-critical of its own assumptions,
its own bleached myths and invisible theologies, and tolerant of what is
not itself. But this calls for pragmatism, to avoid the extremes of dogma
and skepticism. For the latter, as T. S. Eliot said in his Notes Toward a
Definition of Culture, can be a highly civilized trait, though when it
declines into pyrrhonism, it becomes a trait from which civilizations can
die.

VII
Postmodernism and Pragmatism. Here I must make an excursus on
philosophical pragmatism, one more crucial word to add to our
growing verbal family. By 1987, when I published The Postmodern Turn, I
had begun to wonder, like others, how to recover the creative impulse
of postmodernism without atavism or reversion, without relapse into
enervated forms or truculent dogmas, without cynicism or fanaticism.
Facile skepticism lacked conviction; ideological politics was full of
passionate mendacity. I turned then to the philosophical pragmatism of
William James and returned to the artistic pragmatism of John Cage.
Both allowed a place for belief, indeed for unabashed spirituality, in
works like The Will to Believe and A Year from Monday.
Philosophical pragmatism, of course, offers no panacea. But its
intellectual generosity; its epistemic or noetic pluralism; its avoidance
of stale debates (about mind and matter, for instance, freedom and
necessity, nurture and nature); and its affinities with open, liberal,
multicultural societies, where issues must be resolved by mediation and
compromise rather than dictatorial power or divine decree—all these
make it congenial to postmodernism without acceding to the latter’s
potential for nihilism, its spirit of feckless and joyless “play.”
 Ihab Hassan 11

But the virtues of Emersonian and Jamesian—far more than Rortian—

pragmatism affect literary studies generally, not only postmodern
theory. (The topic warrants a monograph in itself.) Perhaps, in antici-
pation of my conclusion, I can say simply this: such virtues are inward
with reality. They resist the hubris of theory, the impatience of ideology,
the rage of our desires and needs—in short, they nurture that “negative
capability” Keats considered essential to great literature.
As for Cage, that genius of postmodern avant-gardes in music, dance,
the visual arts, and literature, he carried negative capability to the
thresholds of non-discrimination. A pragmatist, a descendant of Ameri-
can Transcendentalism withal, a disciple of Zen, Cage’s sacramental
vision of dispossession, of egolessness, perfuses his work from first to
last. Who has not heard rise from his aleatory pages—often composed
by chance operations applied to the I Ching —Cage’s happy, open-
mouthed laugh, echoing the practical hilarity of holy fools in times past
as well as the robust, expansive amiability of William James? That is the
sound of pragmatism, I submit, whose cadences may calm and inspire
us all, especially in cultural and postcolonial studies.

VIII
Beyond Postmodernism: An Inconclusion. Throughout this paper, the
latent question has been: what lies beyond postmodernism? Of course,
no one really knows. But my tacit answer has been: postmodernity. This
is no cause to cheer. Realism teaches us that historical crises do not
always come to happy resolution; we need to learn what history can and
cannot teach. Still, though inequities and iniquities of existence may be
indurate, they are not all irremediable in the particular forms they take.
Two factors aggravate the ordeals of postmodernity in our time: the
glaring disparities of wealth among and within nations, and the furies of
nationalism, collective identity, mass feelings. About the first subject,
crucial as it may be, I will say little: it engages the dismal sciences of
economics and geopolitics, beyond my reach. About the second, I will
hazard a few remarks.
Much is said about difference, about otherness, and much of that is
in the hortatory mode. But those who demand respect for their kind do
not always accord it to other kinds. The fact is that the human brain
exploded mysteriously into evolution a million or so years ago, devising
hasty strategies for survival, which include the distinction between Self
and Other, We and Them.
12 Philosophy and Literature

The division is manifest in the biological world, not only interspecies

(between different species), but also intraspecies (between individuals
of the same species). That is the miracle of our immune systems which
distinguish immediately, electro-chemically, between home bodies and
“invaders.” Such systems, though, can be fooled sometimes into attack-
ing friends and ignoring foes—but that is another story. The division
between Self and Other is also manifest in nearly all our languages, in
the deep structures of grammar and in the vocabularies of the different
pronouns. Hence the distinctions we make between I and You, Us and
Them, We and They, and so forth. Furthermore, the division is active in
the layers of the psyche, as Freudians and Lacanians know, in the
distinction between Ego Instincts (self-centered) and Object or Erotic
Instincts (centered on others), as well as in Lacan’s Mirror Stage and
Symbolic Order. Most pertinent to our topic, however, the division is
clear in the evolutionary and historical development of the family, the
group, the tribe. Human beings would have perished long ago in the
struggle for evolution—to faster, stronger, fiercer animals like the saber-
toothed tiger—were it not for the human brain, human languages, and
human social organizations. Hence the profound instinct of tribalism,
which develops into nationalisms of different kinds, including ethnic,
religious, cultural, and political nationalism.
This instinct is primal—but also primitive. The Bulgarian Nobelist
Elias Canetti wrote, in Auto-da-Fé, about the “mass-soul in ourselves,”
which foams like a huge, wild, full-blooded animal. More soberly, the
great biologist, E. O. Wilson, describes, in Consilience, the “epigenetic
rules” governing the practices of kinship, cooperation, and reciprocal
altruism in human societies.
Now, the mass-soul, the herd or tribal instinct, may be primal. But so
is imagination; so is love; so is the power of sympathy—in short, the
power to vault over distinctions and identify with others. Moreover,
though the division between Self and Other may have been once
essential to survival, it may be less so now , may need to assume different
shapes, in our interactive, interdependent, cybernetic, and “glocal”
age—this hideous neologism can be used only once—the age of
postmodernity.
Still, I do not think that divisions between Self and Other, Us and
Them, will soon vanish, especially if the discrepancies of wealth and
power persist in their flagrant forms. But I do think that, instead of
wishing or talking the distinction away, we can make it more conscious of
itself in our lives. This requires absolute candor, the courage to speak the
 Ihab Hassan 13

truth to ourselves and not only to others. Beyond that, we need to

cultivate a keener, livelier, more dialogical sense of ourselves in relation
to diverse cultures, diverse natures, the whole universe itself. We need
to discover modes of self-transcendence, especially for the “wretched of
the earth,” that avoid blind identification with collectives premised on
exclusion of other groups. This, I realize, is far easier said than done,
especially for the mass-minded in every clime. Still, I would maintain,
that is the spiritual project of postmodernity, a project to which literature and
all the arts remain vital.
Of course, we can define the project of postmodernity simply in
political terms as an open dialogue between local and global, margin
and center, minority and majority, concrete and universal—and not
only between those but also between local and local, margin and
margin, minority and minority, and further still, between universals of
different kinds. But there is never surety that a political dialogue, even
the most open, will not erupt into violence.
To this ancient stain of human violence, I have no remedy. But I
wonder: can postmodern pragmatism serve us in a small way? Can the
imagination serve us in larger ways? Will spirit become the ground from
which new ecological and planetary values spring? This I know: without
spirit, the sense of cosmic wonder, of being and mortality at the widest
edge, which we all share, existence quickly reduces to mere survival.
Something we need to release us from the prison-house of national
identity, and from the terrible grip of self-concern. That is spirit.
In this universe, not all the music is of our own making.

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

1. “Culture, Indeterminacy, and Immanence: Margins of the (Postmodern) Age,”

Humanities in Society 1 (1978); reprinted in Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in
Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987).