Filozofski vestnik Letnik/Volume XXII • Številka/Number 2 • 2001 • 43-58 
THE DANGERS OF POSTMODERNITY -
A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE 
PAUL CROWTHER 
Introduction 
In this paper, I shall identify some key dangers presented by patterns of 
existence in the postmodern life-world. I will also indicate the basis of an 
adequate - that is to say, refoundational philosophical response to them. (A 
response of this kind is one which links cognition to constants bound up with 
the nature of human embodiment, but which allows that these constants are 
activated in contrasting ways under different historical conditions.) 
Part One. 
David Harvey has noted that in the postmodern era economic modes of 
production have shifted away from the rigidly determined practices of the 
post-war period. Of the postmodern economy, Harvey notes 
'It rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, 
products and patterns of consumption. It is characterised by the 
emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing 
financial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates 
of commercial, technological, and organisational innovations'.1 
These radical innovations likewise engender a more globally integrated 
market. The ambiguities of this have been usefully summarised by Philip Cooke 
as follows: 
'One of the most important changes in setting has been the emergence 
in the late modern period of an increasingly integrated global economy, 
' David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodemity: An Enquiry into the origins of Cultural Change 
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 147. 
PAUI. CROWTIIKR 
dominated by the most advanced forms of capitalist production and 
exchange. This development could be thought to run counter to the ... 
trend towards decentralisation. Yet it is not, because the global system 
has no centre. It is a decentred space of flows rather than a clearly 
hierarchical structured space of production'.2 
This global but de-centred integration opens up a fascinating possibility 
- namely for the macro-social dimension of the civilizing process to facilitate 
greater integration without the use of coercive force. And again, this potential 
is also complemented by the globalizing effects of innovation in the field of 
medical and information technologies. The existence of satellite television 
and the Internet, for example, enable social developments and interactions 
to be communicated to even the most remote parts of the world. The 'global 
village' metaphor is in this respect an apt one. We now live in an epoch where 
consciousness of humanity and its vicissitudes as a species, is an idea which can 
be presented with sensory vividness rather than in merely abstract ideal terms. 
The self-regulation intrinsic to the civilizing process can accordingly be 
informed by a more intense universal orientation than has been possible 
before. 
There is, of course, no guarantee that this universalised self-consciousness 
will be able to consolidate itself. On the one hand the possibility of developing 
the appropriate kinds of correlated international institutions and admini-
strative structures is a formidably difficult one; and, on the other hand, any 
globalizing dynamic will tend to occur alongside vehement - even violent -
assertions of local identity (as is the case, for example, in the tragic late 
twentieth century conflicts in the Balkans). This being said, however, there is 
no intrinsic reason why these difficulties should not find some cumulatively 
satisfactory resolution. It is, as the popular idiom has it, 'all to play for' . 
Given these possibilities, and other undoubted advances made in relation 
to the other positive criteria of the civilizing process, it may seem that we are 
on the threshold of some golden age. However, if taken to an extreme, this 
can result in a negative factor vis a vis the civilizing process, namely symbolic 
arrest wherein communities and individuals are locked into transactions with 
symbols at the expense of and as a substitute for more basic life processes. 
Indeed, in the contemporary world there are of poststructuralist persuasion 
those who would deny that we can meaningfully talk of such processes 
independently of their symbolic modes of articulation. 
2 Philip Cooke, Back to the Future: Modernity, Postmodernity and Locality (London: Unwin 
Hyman, 1990), p. 141. 
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T I I E DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE 
Before considering this let us look at the broad form of specifically 
postmodern symbolic arrest in more detail. 
In its widest manifestations this takes the form of consumerism. Such a 
phenomenon has been a strong feature in the world socio-economic structure 
since the 1950's (and, indeed before that in the USA). It is a form of social 
mentality which seeks gratification through the purchase of items and where 
this gratification derives as much if not more from the packaging and 'lifestyle' 
connotations of an item, than its practical utility. Consumerism - as opposed 
to the production and exchange of goods per se- is driven by the advertising 
industry and concomitant productive patterns of in-built obsolescence i.e. 
artefacts made in such a way as to be used and disposed of quickly, so that the 
consumer is driven towards the purchase of new ones. In this form of society 
social kudos purtains primarily not towards achievement in the specialised 
symbolic practices, but rather to the variety of brand labelled goods which 
the individual has the financial resources to buy. 
Consumerism is intricately bonded to a second factor in postmodern 
symbolic arrest, namely the global expansion of mass-media and information 
technology. Whatever universalising potential this may have, it comes at a 
great cultural price. In this respect, Neil Postman has observed that: 
'We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are 
given form by television, not the printed word. To be sure there are still 
readers and there are many books published, but the uses of print and 
reading are not the same as they once were; not even in schools, the last 
institutions where print was thought to be invincible ... Print is now 
merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some 
extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made 
to look like televisions screens'.3 
Postman makes an extremely damning analysis of the effects of television 
th roughou t all aspects of contemporary social existence, By its nature, 
television is a medium where compositional and editorial factors are to the 
fore. No matter how documentary its intent, the television programme is 
primarily constructed from different camera shots, and edited tape sequences. 
This in itself makes the medium unsuited to the presentation of temporally 
sustained rational exposition and argument. Material of this kind has to be 
compressed into more editorially amenable units. 
Television's internal destructiveness vis a vis the foregoing has been 
3 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness 
(London: Methuen, 1987), p. 28. 
4 5 
PAUI. CROWTHER 
dramatically compounded by the colonising power of one of its particular 
usages - in commercial advertising. Postman observes that: 
'The move away from the use of propositions in commercial advertising 
began at the end of the nineteenth century. But it was not until the 
1950's that the television commercial made linguistic discourse obsolete 
as the basis for product decisions. By substituting images for claims, the 
pictorial commercial made emotional appeals, not tests of truth, the 
basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and 
advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there 
once existed a connection between them'.4 
Indeed Postman continues: 
'the television commercial is not all about the character of products to 
be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. 
Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of scenic lakes and macho 
fishing trips, of elegant dinners ... - these tell us nothing about the 
products being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies 
and dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser needs to 
know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the 
buyer'.5 
Now these observations, of course, illuminate the link between television 
and the symbolically arrested consumer sensibility noted earlier, However, 
Postman also emphasises a much more far-reaching point namely that the 
television commercial and related entertainment idioms have colonised the 
presentation of news, current affairs, and politics. Not what is reported but 
how it is reported becomes the focus of meaning - its style, its 'cleverness' of 
presentation, and, in the case of politics and politicians, ' image' and 'sound 
bite'. Additionally (although Postman does not dwell on it much) more trivial 
pursuits such as sport are presented as if they were of the greatest existential 
import. The means to this are a sustained build-up to the sporting event 
through frenzied advertising in the weeks preceding it and then endless 
interviews and expert opinions etc. etc. just before, and during the actual 
occurrence of the event. In the world of postmodern symbolic arrest, life and 
death, world events, and the world of sport assume equal entertainment value. 
"Ibid, p. 131. 
5 Ibid, p. 131. 
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TIIE DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE 
Part Two 
It is also notable how symbolic arrest has permeated the world of public 
services and utilities and even educational institutions. Within them develop 
what might be called a 'management culture' wherein services and processes 
are 'repackaged' and 'products' are promoted as if the relationships involved 
were purely commercial ones. The dimension of symbolic arrest here focuses 
on the way in which management culture seeks to promote 'efficiency' but 
does so only by interpreting it on the basis of models of social interaction and 
outcomes derived from cybernetics and the advertising industry. What results 
is not a more functionally efficient institution or service but rather one which 
is seen to display a well organised management structure. In effect, the symbolic 
relations and internal dynamics of bureaucracy become ends in themselves. 
Another zone of postmodern symbolic arrest which is worth considering 
is in the visual arts. Here there is some affinity with the management culture 
just discussed. In 1964, for example, Tom Wolfe's book The Painted Word6 put 
a light-hearted case for interpreting much twentieth-century modernist art as 
dependent for its intelligibility upon accompanying bodies of theoretical 
discourse. Wolfe's reading is, in fact, not true of this art perse, but it is true of 
much conceptually-based 'art ' practice since the 1960's. Elsewhere7 I have 
argued that 'meaning' in such works is largely determined by contemporary 
curatorial interests - the art object exists only as a vehicle for talk about art 
and its modes of social significance or otherwise. It's raison d'être is as a 
symbolic display not of art, but of those conditions and institutions under 
which it is constituted by persons whose proper business is its management, 
criticism, or historical interpretation. 
The phenomenon of symbolic arrest has also characterised dominant 
contemporary strategies in the other specialised symbolic practices, most 
notably philosophy, literary theory and the social sciences. At the heart of this 
is a group of theoretical approaches known collectively as poststructualism. 
Figures such as Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault and (to some extent) 
Baudrillard,8 emphasise that knowledge only occurs as an articulation within 
a field of signifying relations, and that this renders meaning, truth, and 
subjectivity, much more unstable and fluid notions than has hitherto been 
® Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). 
7 In my 'Against Curatorial Imperialism: Merleau-Ponty and the Fundamental Historicity 
of Art', in the Blackwell Companion to Art Theory ed. P. Smith and C. Wilde, Blackwells 
(forthcoming). 
* For a critique of Baudrillard's position see Chapter 9 of my The Language of Twentieth 
Century Art: A Conceptual History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997). 
4 7 
PAUI. CROWTIIKR 
supposed. This att i tude has become a general characterist ic of much 
contemporary thought. In fact, Hans Bertens has suggested that something 
like it informs most recent attempts to comprehend the general nature of 
postmodernity. In his words: 
'If there is a common denominator to all ... postmodernisms, it is that 
of a crisis of representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to 
represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are 
aesthetic, epistemological, oral, or political in nature, the representations 
that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted'.9 
The most radical form of this scepticism is found in Derrida's philosophy. 
Derrida's basic position has been excellently summarised by Wolfgang Welsch 
as follows: 
'Derrida proved that meaning is always due to the inscription in media, 
and that mediality does not first ensue subsequently and externally but 
is constitutive for meaning at the outset, that it has productive significance 
for processes of meaning. Meaning is not, as the metaphysical tradition 
had thought, 'tarnished' or faked through the materiality of the medium; 
rather without this connection there would be no meaning at all. The 
pure sign-free meaning which the tradition had dreamt of was a 
phantom. Today this is - thanks to media experience - the state of 
reflection in philosophy'.10 
Welsch's point in the last sentence here is an important one. The diverse 
modes of representation made possible by recent innovations in media and 
information technology are themselves an exemplification of Derrida's sign-
based epistemology. They reveal the ways in which di f ferent media are 
constitutive of our ways of experiencing the world. Hence Welsch's general 
conclusion that: 
'today's philosophy considers complete worlds - be it the everyday world, 
the physical world, or a literary world - to be constructions and, to this 
extent, at least in part to be artefacts. Artistic or fictional feats, inhere in 
all worlds, starting with the fundamental schemata of perception, via 
modes of symbolisation, through to the forms of evaluation of objects. 
And it cannot be said that any of these procedures and criteria could be 
straightforwardly derived from a reality-in-itself. - All worlds are basically 
artificial worlds.'" 
0 Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 11. 
10 Wolfgang Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1997), p. 177. 
" I b i d , p. 171. 
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T I I E DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE 
Welsch's leap from the fact that signs necessarily mediate our experience 
of reality, to the conclusion that they are constitutive of it in a radical sense, is 
what I shall call epistemological nihilism. Such a viewpoint does not deny that 
there is a realm of being beyond signification, but it does deny that this realm 
can provide the conceptual foundations for distinguishing between forms of 
knowledge, or for the objective superiority of one conceptual frame over 
another. 
Epistemological nihilism is, I would suggest, the inevitable outcome of 
all the varieties of poststructualism. Indeed, the familiar idea of reality as a 
'social construct' propagated in much social science and 'discourse theory' is 
itself a crude form of epistemological nihilism. I would argue further that 
such nihilisms exemplify postmodern symbolic arrest in its most dense and 
strangulating form. Reality is seen in the most basic terms, as an effect of 
varieties of symbolic artifice. Rather than achieving self-regulation through 
adapting to, and articulating reality, self-consciousness is locked into the fantasy 
that symbolic display of one sort or another is a sufficient characterisation of 
the real. In a sense this involves an unrecognised regression to a mythical 
mode of thought, insofar as symbol and reality are taken to be fused with one 
another. 
Now it might be argued that the problem, of symbolic arrest has been 
overstated here. Whatever else is the case about postmodern society, it 
represents a real diversification of life-choices which are open to the individual, 
and, in particular, it has allowed the voices of marginalised or repressed 
communi t ies to not only obtain a hearing, but to become a part of a 
mainstream eclectic culture. 
But again, whilst these are indeed positive factors, the dimension of 
symbolic arrest presents, nevertheless, the direst problems. The irony is that 
whilst the potential for great advance exists, this potential is being squandered 
and much worse. The squandering consists in the way that symbolic arrest 
actually works counter to its intended effects. In the health services, for 
example, the nursing profession still caters for patients, but the energies of 
experienced s taf f -which could be of most benefit to those who are in need of 
care - is diverted into useless administrative duties. These duties engender 
plans, flow charts, and other signifiers of efficiency, but this is efficiency only 
in a rhetorical sense. The figures 'cash out' . Budgets are balanced but 
responsibility for patient care is devolved on to the young and inexperienced. 
In practice, the patient loses out. The very functions which define the nursing 
profession are contradicted by the means of their, supposedly, more efficient 
realisation. 
This embod ie s a k ind of law of symbolic arrest which pervades 
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PAUI. CROWTIIKR 
contemporary society. Broadly speaking, the more the term 'quality' is used 
as a rhetorical goal in relation to operational strategies in the public services, 
utilities, and education, the more the image of efficient operation is conveyed, 
and the less, correspondingly, are the actual benefits which accrue to the 
recipients. Admittedly, the systems still work but how they work is a pale shadow 
of the ways in which they could and should work. 
The danger is amplified in the context of information technology. In his 
book The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality Michael Heim judiciously observes that 
'Business in America embraced computers under the magic rubric of 
productivity. Yet company reports do not seem to get better after thirty 
drafts. Real economic productivity in the United States actually declined 
over the last decade, and so has the competitiveness of the US economy. 
Feel productive; push more paper.'12 
Of course information technology is an enormous boon in relation to all 
aspects of contemporary productive processes, but Heim's point is that it also 
engenders a futile tendency to produce information for its own sake, even in 
contexts where it is actually meant to promote efficiency. More generally he 
notes that: 
'Infomania erodes our capacity for significance. With a mind-set fixed 
on information, our attention span shortens. We collect fragments. We 
become mentally poorer in overall meaning. We get into the habit of 
clinging to knowledge bits and loose our feel for the wisdom behind 
the knowledge.'1'1 
On these terms, the new technology tends to engender an aimless and 
fragmented pursuit of information for its own sake. The computer-user 'surfs 
the Internet' in the apotheosis of what Heidegger once characterised as empty 
'curiosity'. This - like the wanderings of the 'f laneur' - has its attractions, but 
not if carried to a point of obsessive ness. Such a point, if culturally generalised, 
takes us to the zone of absolute danger. Heim's book is actually illustrative of 
this in several respects. For example, whilst identifying the dangers of 
information technology obsession his response to this is to advocate a quasi-
mystical oriental counter-philosophy which, in effect, amounts to a kind of 
exotic Californian holiday which occasionally keeps one away f rom the 
computer. In terms of reality, however, Californian holidays are, at best, of 
12 Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
1994), p. 5. 
13 Ibid, p. 10. 
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T I I E DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE 
limited duration. They do not amount to taking control of a situation - which 
is surely the response demanded here. 
The real problem is that information technology (and variants - such as 
virtual reality) have, like the media and advertising industries, an intoxicating 
glamour whereby the individual focuses on and consumes the symbolic means 
rather than the functional ends which are involved. And like the televisual 
image, information technology has its own adverse epistemological effect over 
and above the mere diminution of attention span. Heim describes it as follows: 
'The computer absorbs our language so we can squirt symbols at 
lightening speeds or scan the whole range of human thought with 
Boolean searches. Because the computer, not the student does the 
translating, [a] shift takes place subtly. The computer system slides us 
from a fierce awareness of things to the detached world of logical 
distance. By encoding language as data the computer already modifies 
the language we use into mathematized ASCII (American Standard Code 
of Information Interchange). We can then operate with the certitude 
of Boolean formulas. The logical distance we gain offers all the allure of 
control and power without the pain of having to translate back and forth 
from our everyday approach to the things we experience."4 
On these terms, thought processes which follow the prompting of 
information technology have a reductive effect. The sensible particularity and 
complexity of the real is expressed abstractly as a logic of inclusion and 
exclusion vis a vis class membership. Reality does, of course, have this aspect, 
but symbolic expressions of it do no justice to such things as, for example, 
concrete patterns of human interaction. Applied beyond the appropriate 
context, the idioms of information technology function as symbolic displays 
which distort and conceal the realities which they are meant to articulate. 
Part Three 
All the factors which I have described so far enmesh with one another. 
Postmodern existence both operates and is definable within a world wide 
web of symbolic arrest. And in every web there is something nasty. In this case 
the something nasty is uniquely, a product of the factors which constitute the 
web. It is a 'creature' of two converging aspects - one being an artificially 
induced mutation of self-consciousness, and the other being a something 
'other ' than human being. 
14 Ibid, p. 21. 
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PAUI. CROWTIIKR 
The former I shall call the qualitative cyborg. To work towards its 
understanding let us first define the cyborg as a human who has been 
implanted with genetically-engineered tissue or micro-chip technology. In a 
quantitative sense this is not problematic. Interventions of this sort can enhance 
the body's capacity to resist illness, disease, and can compensate for congenital 
deficiencies. However, let us suppose that these interventions are directed 
not towards resisting or preventing adverse factors in bodily existence but 
towards the transformation of cognitive structures. 
There is a massive amount of contemporary writing which wriggles and 
writhes in ecstasy at this very prospect.15 The idea is that if one can 'interface' 
with a virtual-reality cyberspace whenever one desires then this will engender 
a liberation from the body and a projection into a realm of f reedom and 
realisable fantasy. William Gibson's novel Neuromanceris frequently cited as a 
exemplar of what this might be like. 
It is, however, important to distinguish between this essentially fantasy 
notion of the cyborg and the qualitative variety. All fantasy derives its potency 
and desirability from the matrix of physical embodiment. There can only be 
adventures in virtual cyberspace because of the patterns of loss and gain - the 
'economy of desire' referred to in the last Chapter - which characterises the 
being of embodied subjectivity. No matter how immersed in virtual cyberspace 
one might become, what is experienced there only has meaning by virtue of 
its reference back to the body and its mundane interactions. Remove that, 
and the conditions which render fantasy meaningful are removed. The 
significance of desire realised in a cyber-world may appear to be other than 
that of normal embodied existence, but it merely extends the customary 
economy of desire in an unrecognised form. And the real always returns. At 
some point the cybernaut is reluctantly summoned back to the domain of 
everydayness. He or she thus becomes something of a divided 'unhappy 
consciousness' in the Hegelian sense. 
Now it might be that the cybernaut may be able to strike some modus 
vivendi between the real and the virtual. But unless the nature of this relation 
and it components are subjected to searching critical scrutiny on the basis of 
an adequate epistemology, all thatwe have are fantasies of harmony. And one 
particularly foolish fantasy of this kind beckons to the cyber-addict. It is that 
of the total immersion scenario, where the addict chooses to be placed in a 
virtual-system which brings about the delusion that what they are experiencing 
15 See, for example, some of the essays in Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology, and Post-
Human Pragmatism, ed. Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J. Cassidy (London: Routledge, 
1998). 
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T I I E DANGERS OF P O S T M O D E R N I IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE 
is real. The addict is able to exist continuously in this cyber-world though also 
being placed in a biomechanical support system which provides for nutrition, 
the discharge of waste, and regular toning up of muscles and tissue. The film 
The Matrix is loosely prophetic of this. 
Such a context radicalises the dimension of unhappy consciousness noted 
earlier. For the cybernaut's existence is now absolutely dependent on a reality 
which - as a deluded subject - he or she has no volitional relation to. No 
matter what interactive cyber relations evolve within the total immersion 
system, and no matter how reliable in principle the biomechanical support 
system is, they are absolutely dependent on contingencies. A super-virus, 
environmental disaster, or even the malignant flick of a switch outside the 
system, could destroy this cyber-world in toto. The individuals within the system 
would have no opportunity to prepare for such happenstances, neither would 
they be able to formulate responses to them. 
The burgeoning literature of cyber-babble rarely reaches as far as these 
insights. Indeed, its preoccupation with cybernaut fantasies has meant that 
the real issue has scarcely been addressed. For the cyborgs just described do 
not embody a radical transformation of humanity, but rather a particularly 
stupid mode of self-indulgence. The cyber-augmentation of cognitive capacities 
involved here amounts to little more than a quantitative intensification of 
those patterns of desire and gratification which are defined by the condition 
of embodied subjectivity. 
The qualitative cyborg is very different. This can be shown by developing 
a contrast . The embod ied subject 's remembrance of the past and its 
imaginative projection of experiential possibility involve the generation of 
imagery to satisfy linguistic descriptions. This generation is, however, at best 
piecemeal, fragmentary, and highly creative. Indeed, it is precisely the 
incompleteness of such generation which necessitates narrative as the basis 
of the cohesion of die self. We know that the body exists continuously through 
space and time, but we can only comprehend this existence as a unity (i.e. 
become self-conscious) insofar as the continuum is marked out in terms of 
mutually significant episodes and events. This narrative structure depends as 
much upon what we are unable to remember or project, as it does upon what 
we can actually realise. 
Let us suppose, however, that through biomechanical implants or 
genetically engineered tissues, some humans are able to massively augment 
their powers of recall and imaginative projection. Their mental engrams now 
admit of virtually full rather than schematic embodiment. A being of this 
kind can choose to, as it were, switch-off its present input of stimuli, so as to 
replay past experiences or project possible ones with a sensory vividness that 
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PAUI. CROWTIIKR 
approximates immediate perception. For such an agent it would seem as if 
these experiences were actually occurring in the present. 
In order for such a cyborg to function it would need some kind of cognitive 
bracketing out mechanism whereby its virtual experiences were recognised 
as projections and not real stimuli from the present, This is necessary because 
if an agent could not distinguish between present, past, and mere possibility, 
its sense of self would be collapsed. This being said, it may be that bracketing 
devices of the most enormous complexity could be developed. These would 
enable a controlled interface between both the present and past and possible 
experience, which could draw simultaneously on all the senses and the subject's 
general experiential viewpoint. Hence, in recalling a past event, we would 
not only project what we perceived but also something of those affective states 
and broader attitudes which informed that particular perceptual engagement. 
Similarly, in projecting future or counterfactual possibilities, we would not 
only 'see' and ' hear' etc. a state of affairs but would also extrapolate and 
project an image of how we might feel in that context and how our personal 
worldview might differ from its present incarnation. 
A biotechnical project of this kind would probably, at the outset, have a 
purely quantitative orientation. It would seek to merely improve or augment 
human cognitive mechanisms. In the long term, however, it could easily 
produce a qualitative transformation. This is because the specifically human 
form of finitude is here radically changed. To be able both to recreate the 
past and project alternative experiences with virtual exactness, is to eliminate 
that dimension of incompleteness and lack which necessitate narrative as the 
basis of unity of the self. For the qualitative cyborg, nothing is lost and nothing 
much is gained in the passage of life. On the one hand, its past moments can 
live again in the present and on the other hand, the attractions of the future 
are vitiated through the power to project alternative experiential possibilities 
at will and at any time. The emphasis in experience is, thereby, shifted away 
from narrative meaning towards mere continuity. Different things happen to 
the qualitative cyborg, but none of these things existentially outweigh any 
other. The past does not fade, and any future or counterfactual possibility 
that one cares to project can live, as it were, in advance of the future. Every 
experience has equality of intensity and value. 
On these terms, then, mere augmentation of cognitive capacities can lead 
to a being whose finitude is qualitatively different from that of a human. Such 
a being has an immediate present, but to the degree that it can recall or 
project its experience is not closely bound to that immediate present. In the 
case of the human being, in contrast, the immediate present forms the focal 
point of its sense of self. As it cannot recall the past or project alternative 
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T I I E DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI I Y - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE 
exper iences with any completeness, it must link these selectively and 
evaluatively in a cumulative narrative which contextualises and makes its 
immediate present meaningful. 
The qualitative cyborg has no need of such a narrative. Such self-
consciousness as it starts with is compressed into a one dimensional vector of 
activity - namely a means /end rationality directed towards maximising the 
possibilities of its own survival. The only avenues of intrinsic value which would 
be relevant to it are those symbolic specialised practices which have 
technological or practical use. Given the appropriate interface stations one 
such cyborg would be able to communicate its own history in toto to another. 
There would be no problem of interpersonal communication since the very 
narrative factors which are the basis of personality are what the qualitative 
cyborg's cognitive augmentations serve to diminish. Language, empathic 
identification, and imagination would be mechanised in the direction of 
informational interface alone. The aesthetic dimension of experience would 
disappear entirely. Such a being would only be self-conscious in a formal sense 
i.e. it could identify itself as having occupied and being able to occupy spatio-
temporal co-ordinates other than its immediate one, but these would not 
matter to it except in a quantitative sense. They would simply be units 
accumulated alongside others in the continuous flow of its existence. 
Now a cyborg of this kind begins - in my scenario - as an implanted 
h u m a n whose cognitive augmentat ions push it unintentionally in this 
dehumanised direction. It is driven by animal instincts for survival and 
reproduction, and, given the elimination of narrative meaning, these are all 
that its cognitive powers can be directed towards. There would be nothing 
else for it. It follows, therefore, that such a being would gradually seek out 
and bond with others of the same kind for survival and reproductive purposes. 
Given the appropriate in vitro fertilisation and nurturing technology it is quite 
possible that these purposes could be realised. Humanity would have 
accidentally created a mutant species which would find its own creators at 
best incomprehensible and, at worst, of significance only insofar as they 
inhibited or could be put to use in the facilitation of cyborg survival. Not only 
would these beings be alien to the civilizing process, they could threaten its 
very existence. 
The technological innovations which make the qualitative cyborg feasible 
are also of considerable concern in themselves, especially in relation to the 
massively accelerat ing growth of artificial neural networks and nano-
technology. It is possible, for example, that artificial intelligence will be created 
with a capacity to evolve autonomously towards levels of biological complexity. 
If such 'artilects' were able to engage with one another and engender their 
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PAUI. CROWTHKR 
own 'forms of life' (in the Wittgensteinian sense) then the human species 
would find that it had, inadvertently, created a much more powerful rival to 
its own dominion of the earth. The potential for violence here would almost 
be beyond comprehension. 
Qualitative cyborgs and artilects are not just science-fiction, they are 
already visible on the technological horizon. We are making them emerge 
from the world wide web of symbolic arrest. Unfortunately it is the cosy science-
fiction mentality of cyber-babble which inhibits an adequate awareness of the 
dangers which the qualitative cyborg and the artilect present. Science fiction 
- however horrible the possibilities it projects - is a human endeavour with 
outcomes controlled by its creators. The possibilities which I am describing 
are not. In the unpleasant unglamorous real world our capacity for controlled 
endings has been diminished. Things much-worse than the possibilities which 
I have described may happen. Unfortunately, because contemporary symbolic 
arrest is unable to distinguish between scientific fact and the comforts of 
science fiction, it regresses to a level of mythic understanding which is of a 
particularly childish kind. Everything has to work out for the best, in the end, 
so all that we need do in the meantime is to float through delicious cyber-
space fantasies. 
We are left then, with the following position. If the postmodern world 
continues on its present symbolically arrested course it is quite conceivable 
that civilization will come to an end through the advent of an era of cyber-
modernity, where mechanised processes define the terms of existence, or 
where biomachines extinguish or enslave the human species. The alternative 
is for philosophy to intervene. This does not entail a rejection of technological 
innovation. Rather it involves a critical thinking through of historical change 
in relation to these enduring epistemological and aesthetic factors which are 
the basis of self-consciousness and the civilizing process. In this way one might 
hope to establish a critical philosophical standpoint which could help regulate 
- however minimally - the transition to what comes after postmodernism. 
Conclusion 
I shall now consider where such a philosophy should be sought, and what 
its relation to postmodernity might be. In terms of the first question, we must 
recall the central tenet of the refoundational strategy, namely that constant 
elements in experience are always articulated under historically specific 
circumstances. This means that their philosophical comprehension will take 
different forms at different times. In some epochs, such and such a constant 
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T I I E DANGERS OF POSTMODERNI IY - A PHILOSOPHICAL RESPONSE 
will figure more centrally in experience than others, and philosophical 
discourse will reflect this accordingly. At other times, constants which hitherto 
only seemed of marginal importance will come to the fore in unexpected 
ways a n d b e c o m e the r eby m u c h more accessible to ph i losophica l 
understanding. 
One of the most striking examples of this is the contemporary primacy of 
signification. Signification is a necessary condition of any possible experience 
over and above mere animal consciousness, and the ubiquity of signs in 
contemporary consumer culture is a heightened expression of this necessity. 
Indeed, the current prevalence of epistemological nihilism has a similar 
disclosive significance vis-a-vis both the structure of signification itself, and its 
more general ramifications. It serves, in particular, (whatever its faults) to 
affirm the fact that meaning is not some simple correspondence between 
sign and referent, but gravitates around the sign's relation to other signs in a 
developing field of signifying relations. This insight is of vital importance in 
comprehending the dynamic complexity of the se l f - but only if it is correlated 
with an understanding of those constant reciprocal relations which stabilise 
the cognitive field, and, thereby, give holistic cohesion to the self. (It is these 
stabilising factors, of course, which epistemological nihilism fails to negotiate.) 
Given this decisive philosophical clue from postmodern culture, and the 
need to overcome its limitations, the question arises as to which philosophical 
positions should be drawn from in this task. On the basis of a refoundational 
approach, one need not be tied to any single thinker or philosophical school. 
This is because any significant philosophical work will offer some way or other 
of identifying constants in experience. The thing is to select sources which 
also i l luminate one 's present situation through their particular way of 
articulating the more enduring factors. In the present case, this means a 
philosophy which can locate us in relation to the clues noted above and which 
can develop them on the basis of a systematic notion of reciprocal relations 
thus enabling the articulation of self-consciousness as a process of realisation. 
This project could usefully draw on the Hegelian tradition, or a totally re-
thought historical materialism. There is, however, an even more directly 
relevant method which itself cuts across some customary methodological 
boundaries. It can be called transcendental hermeneutics. The first term in this 
title signifies an intention to clarify those constants which are logically necessary 
conditions for objective knowledge and self-consciousness. The second term 
indicates that this will not issue in some exhaustive and fixed philosophical 
system, but is, rather, an on-going process of clarification, critique, and 
reformulation - all in all a sustained interpretative task. 
What makes transcendental hermeneutics more than the sum of its two 
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PAUI. CROWTIIKR 
parts, however, is the possibility of progressive articulation. This means that 
through its dialogue with tradition and its own historically specific context of 
experience, transcendental hermeneutics seeks to establish the truth of self-
consciousness on the same basis as the civilizing process itself i.e. as a 
cumulative process advancing - however, erratically - to higher stages. Our 
criterion of 'higher' in this context, is the ability to identify constants and 
their reciprocal relations with one another, to continuously differendate them 
internally and reassess the nature of the whole in the light of this. Just as 
importantly it involves a tracing of the implications of this process in relation 
to the problems of the present and in relation to the present's implications 
for it. 
If such an analytic momentum can be historically sustained each distinct 
phase of development can be, in logical terms, more consistent and more 
comprehensive in explanatory and methodological power than the preceding 
phases. Since, however one of the main effects of historical existence is the 
forgetting of the past, the emphasis of philosophical analysis in any one period 
may - for contemporary cultural reasons - focus on one group of constants 
and forget or neglect others which have been previously illuminated. This is 
why a transcendental hermeneutical approach does not seek a definitive 
resolution to philosophical problems. Changing historical circumstances 
disclose new aspects to familiar categories, as well as concealing others. 
Transcendental hermeneutics, accordingly, involves a constant reinterpreta-
tion of the past in relation to the present, and the acknowledgement that the 
only complete framework of philosophical truth is that of progressive 
articulation as the possibility of a continuous open-ended process of gradual 
cumulative advance. 
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