ABLE: Yes. We see the multinational corporation as an essential vehicle for postmodernity. The electronic informatiion technologies that developed since the 1970s are essential players in the multinational capitalist dynamic. The agile movement of information about capital makes the agile corporation possible on a global surface.
CHARLIE: The Soviet bloc had to fall to make the dynamic complete on the international level. Despite lingering noises of repression in China and the rise of Russia's mafia, the playing field for multinational capital is cleared pretty much around the globe. That is the result of events less than a decade old. So--yes, postmodernity is very recent and still opening into full blossom. The prospects for capital accumulation in vast areas of earth appear almost limitless at this moment!
BAKER: And yet--when we poke around for the conceptual roots of the postmodern, are we satisfied when we have read the French writers who peaked in the 'seventies?
ABLE: Surely they give us the word on TEXT. Deconstruction. Differance. Surely they teach us that we write and talk ourselves into reality, that truth is not transcendental.
CHARLIE: But we acknowledge the disturbers of the tradition, the Frankfurt School. They were busy in the 'twenties.
ABLE: The Marxist underpinnings of their project link with that of late comers like Fredric Jameson. We have not yet sorted out the point where Marxism ceases to be modernist--because it is totalistic--and where it flows into postmodernism--because it is dialectical and therefore deconstructionist.
CHARLIE: But we embrace the Frankfurt School regardless!
ABLE: If only because it spawned Herbert Marcuse, whose 'sixties texts and public role were critically important.
BAKER: Truth to tell, we have to go back to Nietzsche, through Heidegger, to get to origins. Once there, we have to follow Nietzsche back to Plato and pre-Socratics. When we look for a coherent set of postmodern theories to support our Ten Commandments, we come to Heidegger's rendering of Nietzsche's thought and feel that we are coming close to the heart of things.
ABLE: We lived much of our life without appreciating the fullness of Nietzsche's rejection of the western mind set as he found it in the late nineteenth century. It was hard to pay attention when the rejection was so extreme and when the edifices of the tradition seemed still to stand on stones as old as Athens and Rome. Our entire formal education took place without a clear acknowledgment of Nietzsche's voice. Of course, that was nearly half a century ago.
CHARLIE: No wonder that it has been hard for us to come to grips with postmodernity. It happened throughout our lifetime, popped up big in the 'seventies, and did not disturb many of the givens of the life around us until the late 'eighties.
BAKER: It is ironic, therefore, that the conceptual underpinnings of postmodernism have been in our faces for a century. It is as if we have been living beside a sea and hearing its restless waves without ever stopping to wonder what was causing them.
ABLE: Is it time for us to halt the whole game and reconsider? Nietzche's deconstruction of Platonism in the 1880s shows that the tradition of western culture has been falling apart not since the 1970s but at least since the 1880s. Yet we have bought an historical argument that pits totalistic "modernism" against "postmodern" alternatives to totalism. Is it too simple?
BAKER: Of course it is. But modernism as a bourgeois hegemony was already there for Nietzsche to attack. So it might be said he did not arrive before his time. Yet the modernist impulses, based on the Platonic, forged onward into the twentieth century, stronger than voices to the contrary. The tumult and tragedy of the wars had to happen, we might say, before the Nietzschean insight could be seen as something more than a fringe voice.
CHARLIE: When it was heard, its accents were various. Others, like Heidegger and deMan, and later Rorty, expressed the postmodernist theories in their own fashion. Nietzsche could thus be obscured.
BAKER: Let us not reject the "project of the seventies" out of hand. But let's note that it is a limited account.
CHARLIE: Postmodern rivers run deeper than they appear.
ABLE: The rains have flooded Donny Brook. Let's go look.