The stupa takes issue with Modernity in a traditional Pre-Modern way. The hallmark of Modernity is its collapse of Reason=Truth=Reality into a single term, Marcuse's argument. Modernity rejects the possibility of the stupa, Lord Russell's argument against the possibility that Faith can replace Reason. The stupa says that you do not need to observe, infer, measure, or describe the human soul/spirit walking up your driveway in order to understand the Wheel of Life, the terrifying and yet comforting possibilities of renaissance, reincarnation, and the serenity of transcendence, Nirvana.

Change the spelling a bit to get a slightly different metaphor, and the possibility of renaissance poses another, yet similar, challenge for Modernity: You stand on the stoop, the front porch, of Anyhouse USA. Ahead of you is a door flanked by windows. You always know that you will open the door into a parlor area, the most public of the private. You will move to various "stations" of domesticity, losing publicity and gaining intimacy at each. The dining room, the kitchen, the family room. A fork in the road, to the right is garage, basement, and the private/public sanctum known as backyard; to the left is bathroom, bedroom, garbha. 

Here begins an anagogy linking Bhuddist accounts of Nature to Western Metaphysics. I'm a bit slippery in one respect, as Bhuddist theology uses figures of the Body to conceptualize darshan, spirit-as-body which is irreducible and eternal reality. My skeptical, agnostic understanding has the figure of the Body lead to the possibilities of relativism. I'm not too uncomfortable because both interpretations have the effect of opposing Modernity's claim of equivalence for the terms rational and real.

Why don't you enter the house through the porch window, or look for a secret trapdoor that leads to the catacombs? Habit defines Reality by foreclosing possibilities. When you see a book in the parlor, why do you say it's "on the coffee table," when you might say that it's "under the ceiling," "over the floor," or "in the State of Maine"? Because language is not up to the task of representing the complications of Reality all at once, of a piece. Ideologies about what is natural, praxical, or doxastic define Reality by foreclosing perspective. What would be the community's reaction if you scaled a ladder to enter the bedroom directly? Occupants of the house will protect the dagaba, the heart of the womb. If they are heterosexual and in a state-approved, patriarchal household, anything that can be made to fit sensibly within the term Power will define Reality by foreclosing your freedom, and perhaps your life. If the occupants are not properly straight, the law, the police, too often foreclose on everybody.

Modernity concentrates on issues of Reason, justified true belief, epistemology, and rhetorics of knowing. Some, such as Ernst Mach, were shrill in defining as illegitimate all the issues of Reality, metaphysics, rhetorics of Being in a world of subjects and objects: Legend has it that Mach repeated the same line of argument so often in the Vienna Circle that his friends and colleagues, to save time, forced him to signify his rap by standing and shouting the letter "M!" for "that's a metaphysical argument and out of bounds in an Enlightened world of Reason," or words to that effect. 

Notions of Reality, of course, are prior to Reason, for you have to define, to set fences around the venue in which Reason, allegedly and hopefully, will do its work. So Modernity begins with shortcuts that foreclose an understanding of Reality through habit, ideology, and power. At the next "station," it ritualistically declares shortcuts to be irrational. Then you come to three "stations" where rationalized habits, ideologies, and powers are declared to be True=Rational. In the end you return to the garbha, ready for a renaissance, a new life that will last until time, perspective, and human interest move the fences, the definitions, which bind Reason to circumstance.

I make a pun with the term foreclose. I want the meaning of psychoanalytic theory, the idea of a "prior censorship" of possibility, perspective, and freedom. I also want the banker's term for the primary means of enforcing contracts. Modernity's insistence on milking the topos of sameness, thinking that Reality is a transparent singularity, mortgages the human spirit. In worlds made enjoyably complex, the topos of difference -- even with regard to the question What is Real? -- is exhilarating.

Even the more disciplined Modern thinkers frequently confuse signs and signifiers, pulling from their wallet a photograph and saying, in error, "Here's my daughter." Fundamental to Modernity, and to the Platonic thread of Pre-Modernity, is faith that such confusion is trivial. Appearances are portrayed as transparent, and you can "just know" that they will be reliably subverted by Reason. You can "just know" the difference between Fact and Fiction. You can "just believe" that the disciplined use of language, of discourse, of argument more reliably subverts Fiction than Fact. This is no longer the case, if it ever was: The communication revolution of the 20th century has created an ecology, an environment of Representations so comfortable, so very exciting, that they are functionally indistinguishable from the supposed Reality of their alleged referents. You can blast your frustrations in the computer game Doom, even making corporate headquarters buildings into "dungeons" where "monsters" hide. War, as in Iraq, can be morphed into a video game.

Issues arising from responses to the problem What is Real? are no longer merely academic, if they ever were. You want pizza? This sign may link to such a wide variety of signifiers that you won't even know whether you're about to eat a slice of frozen Italian bread garnished with cheese, oregano, and catsup, or a crisp snack cracker flavored with oregano and more salt than you'd need for a whole steak. You want exotic erotics? The term race overpowers difference even in the act of marking and insisting on difference: For a European, sex with an African or an Asian is exotic, but in those terms, any African or Asian will do. You are making it with an emptied signifier, not with a person, a partner.

Throughout the 80's and 90's, television programmers have been obsessed with "reality shows," usually depicting the police in the process of doing what it is that our culture assumes and fondly hopes police do. You are hard-put to find whimsy anywhere in popular culture; Americans are obsessed with Reality. Dick Clark Productions hired Dr. Marcus Welby's old, and Barbra Streisand's new, sidekick, actor James Brolin, to host a Fox Network show that presents five mini-dramas, some based on "real life events," some completely fictional. A game is made of deciding the difference between Fact (well, almost, in a televisual manner of speaking) and Fiction. In the last three minutes of the show Brolin lets viewers in on the secret, and accurately describes the only way you can "get it right": Can you guess?

Reality is now a more complicated, perplexing issue for nurturing and parenting, perhaps for studies of child development: I'm in my study looking at the clip of Rodney King's beating that I want to put up on Fragments, the WWWeb site John Lucaites and I maintain for studies of critical rhetoric. My nine-year-old niece is watching a video of Jurassic Park in the living room. She comes to me with tears in her eyes, frightened by a representation of a Velociraptor more detailed, more perfect, than any camera in a jungle of real animals could manage. How could such a fine sign not have a signifier in Reality? I'm well on my way through the standard parenting rap about the difference between Fact and Fiction, at the part where I suggest that she doesn't need to be frightened because those make-believe animals don't really exist, when I notice her gaze moved to my CRT. The digitized clip of King's beating is playing, over and over. She says "That's scary, too -- but I'm not afraid, 'cause it's not real. Right?"

When I told this story in a listserv posting, my friend and colleague John Waite Bowers restated the issue in this language: "Is a child's difficulty distinguishing between horrors in fiction and horrors in reality all that's meant by 'the postmodern condition'?" Notice how John's Modern mind-set leads him to describe the King clip, a representation, as "horror in reality." (CRTNET News #2017 crtnet@sca)

Representations subvert Reality, or some would say constitute it, by choosing among the possibilities of signification. Reason has only minimal contact with Reality, when you're directly, physically manipulating objects: Usually, Reason is confined to the office of subverting representations.

Most of the furor about problems of Representation has been generated among the literati, especially those writers influenced by European social/political theory, psychoanalytic theory, and aesthetics (primarily visual aesthetics). The title term for such thinking has been postmodern, a reference to an early 20th-century theory of architecture and art that complicated images and designs by showing that historical forms and styles can be mixed and matched, fancifully, without much reference to suppositions about what is allegedly real ("natural and necessary"). Some writers in virtually all the human sciences found the term useful as the vehicle of a metaphor that could articulate hesitations about the hegemony of science; uneasiness about the ideological battles of the Cold War, especially issues arising from the shift of world capitalism from industrial to service and information economies; and hope for a political renaissance that might flavor and enrich democracy with complications of race, gender, and class.

In the last half-century, so much has been thought and written with the aid of the postmodern metaphor as to evince a multidisciplinary intellectual movement reminiscent of early 20th-century positivism. Suffixing an -ism signifies a vast literature and large community of like-minded scholars. It also signals the emergence of an industry, a politics, a piety. The postmodernism that pursues an isolationist policy with regard to other schools and styles of academe -- writing primarily for "insiders," preaching to the converted -- is distressing. Many writers, who could be teaching instead, are politicking in cabals. However, the postmodernism that has developed from Canadian studies of communication and technology -- Harold Innis to Marshall McLuhan to Arthur and Mary Louise Kroker -- and from attempts to meld scholarship with the inherently popular form of the WWWeb -- e. g. Johns Hopkins University's MUSE project -- continue to produce provocative, frequently compelling criticism of contemporary social and cultural practices.

Postmodernism, however, gets in the way of understanding that we may be living through another renaissance, another reincarnation, standing on the stoop with no idea what "stations" await in Anyhouse, USA. It invites some to think that the postmodern is like a political platform, or an academic fashion, that can be voted away or simply gotten over. So the University of Chicago will host a conference in November 1997 on the possibilities of thought "After Postmodernism" (see also the Simons and Billig collection of essays, and the more sinister Crossroads Project announcement of a Death of Truth Conference). It invites insularity, isolationism. And it perpetuates an early conceptual error in understanding the term change in the 20th century: Because the most prominent feature of the Modern is its obsession with Reason, most took it for granted that any alternative to Modernity would be a different, perhaps more correct episteme, Foucault's term. In fact, I think most people understand knowing. Pick any discipline from Aristotle's dialectic to Habermas's neo-Cartesian reveries -- it doesn't matter, because minding their p's and q's is a problem only for people who do not wish to do so, and others who wish to discipline them for their audacious, heretical refusal of Reason.

"Political correctness, permissiveness, extremes in tolerance, overemphasis on ethnicity, fabricated history, the denigration of reason--these are a few of the symptoms of postmodernism. [Postmodernism is]
. . . a frightening assemblage of assaults on simple truth."
D. James Kennedy, Ph.D.
Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church

.

The missing nuance is that any "new episteme" is likely to reject the term episteme. The term is an attempt to code the postmodern in the terms and with the resources of the modern. It cannot code the postmodern on its own terms. Technology subverts Modern understandings of Reason; or more precisely, it subordinates the problems of Reason to the problems of Representation, the issues that arise from asking What is Real? If it is desirable to preserve Foucault's points about interpenetrating Power/Knowledge (and I think it is), one might suggest that human history is marked by ontemes as well as epistemes. Such a term would call attention to taken-for-granted ontological commitments.

Let's change suffixes from -ism to -ity as we take up the business of birthing ACJ. Postmodernity keeps attention on the conditions, situations, and circumstances which determine, influence, prompt postmodernism. -Ity is stimulus, -ism is response. Rather than conduct a popularity poll centering on personalities or styles of scholarship, students of postmodernity could think of such as Baudrillard as rhetoricians responding to rhetorical situations: What does Baudrillard see in the world that seduces him to write what he writes? Why is he so droll, pessimistic? Why is his humor negative, full of sarcastic irony and arrogant ridicule? What about the present condition makes him think more in terms of cataclysm than hope?

"In the view we will present, Einstein's formula is even more significant than physicists have realized. It is actually a statement about how much energy is required to give the appearance of a certain amount of mass, rather than about the conversion of one fundamental thing, energy, into another fundamental thing, mass. Indeed, if that view is correct, there is no such thing as mass -- only electric charge and energy, which together create the illusion of mass. " (Bernhard Haisch, Alfonso Rueda & H.E. Puthoff)

With postmodernity, Reality is more clearly at issue. Rhetorical and social theorists have for years written about social reality; but, articulated within the sets and props of Modernity, the effect of the adjective social has been to compromise the term reality. That is, it was understood that the poor fools who dwell within social realities just can't see how things really are. The notion that Reality is always already known (or that it is at least a totalizing term that represents the concept of an always already known condition) forecloses a different adjectival function: The possibility of making meaning by attaching social to reality is a compelling indication that the stuff of Reality is changing. One would not choose the term if it were not already suspected that Modern accounts of Reality have failed. Social reality, I mean to say, is Real by virtue of its Sociality, not by virtue of its Rationality or its simple empirical Being. Reality is Real just because it is social. So, for instance, one can entertain the dispersal of the term postmodern into Science, the golden calf of Modernity: The postmodern deconstruction of mathematics is already begun. A postmodern physics is also under construction, "in which mass, inertia and gravity arise from underlying electromagnetic processes": Modern physics culminates in Einstein's equation E=mc2, leaving me two mutually exclusive terms to inscribe the physical universe, matter and energy. This duality is broken by the possibility that matter is a Representation, an illusion of electromagnetism, a third term with a known, but misconceived signifier.

These possibilities, of course, are bound to seem outrageous. It may be that such thinking quacks along just this
side of fried-brain phantasm. What is to be made of 
The Sarfatti Group, for instance? Is this a cult? Or is there a "physics underground" to be taken more seriously?

With Reality at issue, the possibility of an abundance of third terms usefully complicates Representation. In rhetorical theory, it seems wise to question the duality of orality and literacy. A close friend spent some time in Europe recently, and kept in touch with his partner through e-mail. After just a few note exchanges, the two of them were at each other's throats -- virtually everything communicated was wildly misinterpreted. My friend suggests that this was a limitation of his medium of communication, that some communicative tasks, specifically argument, cannot be conducted successfully on e-mail. He portrays computer mediated communication as a technological enablement, a tool that one can pick up for the purpose of communication, like a pencil or a typewriter. With but two terms at hand (speaking and writing), he is forced to analyze his experience by figuring how each of these terms is implicated in e-mail. A compressed turn-taking time makes it like speaking, but the dominance of text makes it like writing. In this way of thinking, you can talk things out with an intimate, and you can negotiate with an intimate in letters; but the "mixed" nature of e-mail makes either task virtually impossible. 

What I'm calling for here is more work targeted directly on cybering, as opposed to work that always presents it "contextualized," which too often means "through terms and resources that virtually insure misinterpretation." I like Mark Poster's style of questioning, when I imagine it adapted to rhetorical and social theory.

Or not: Suppose that the difficulty may arise from the attempt to force something entirely new into old terms that cannot stretch to accommodate. If this were so, I'd need a third term just to think about the possibility. I'm currently using cybering to imagine a third alternative to speaking and writing. If I had no Modernist presuppositions about the necessity of received categories; if I waited to describe the e-mail experience until I understood it in its own terms, and could practice it easily, would I come to my friend's opinion about the possible functions of cybering? Or, perhaps, borrowing an angle from postmodern physics, might I come to understand that writing is an illusion (as mass is an illusion) of speaking (electromagnetism), and cybering is "released" in the exchange/conversion (energy)? Is it possible that the fusion I've been taught to call multimedia is in fact a whole that resists analysis except as a convenience? It could be, I think, that my friend's trouble with his partner may result from his own misunderstanding of e-mail, his own lack of practice with the act of cybering.

With a third term such as cybering, interesting problems of identity and performance are more easily conceived. In the process of theorizing smoking fetishes on the WWWeb, for instance, Tyrone Adams and I discovered "Jenny." In the terms of Modernity, one might say that "Jenny performs herself" on her personal homepage. But this turns out to be another signifier confusion, the same as my falsely asserting that my daughter is in the margins above. "Jenny" is pure performance, leaving little evidence of the identity performing. She is an avatar. She claims to be an anarchistic rebel, a sweet-faced teenager photographed in various Lolita poses, a lesbian who smokes because her lover thinks it's sexy and because she resents and resists nettlesome anti-smoking propaganda. She had asked others on the WWWeb to send pictures of themselves in Lolita poses, and to write narratives of their "first time" for smoking and for sex, blurred genres.
 

Is there a Who on "Jenny's" page? Is she passing, conformist for rebel, straight for gay, old for young, pretty for plain, male for female, political argument for person? Could she be an aging collector of lesbian soft porn, seducing girls to provide erotic poses? Could he be a convicted child molester "keeping in touch" while jailed in Attica? Could it be a tobacco industry think-tank preparing for the target-marketing of teenagers when more "above ground" advertising has been prohibited? If I were thinking in Modernity, I would say "All of the above," and then start deciding which possibility was Real: Will the Real "Jenny" please stand up? But I am thinking in Postmodernity, and when I say "All of the above" I will try to theorize how this "schizophrenic" avatar, this pure performance of at least five personalities simultaneously inhabiting the same Representation, is already Real: What will I do with polysemic "Jenny" when there is no Who in he/she/it?
 

My point is that ACJ should become a site for creative theory construction, a place where the big questions are posed and discussed. As this works out, I hope that we will become more open to and interested in the texts of postmodernism, but that we will discipline ourselves to keep them in the background, subordinated to the more important, and ultimately more interesting arguments about postmodernity. Further, ACJ should be a place where the virtues of communication are displayed, where it is demonstrated that applications of the postmodern metaphor need not always lead to dense, overly-playful discourse. The Cartesian who says "Be Clear" should be resisted when thinking needs to be complicated; but the rhetorical theorist who says "Be Clear" should be encouraged in the quite different effort to keep terms and arguments understandable. Finally, ACJ should take full advantage of its position within the formations of cybering. The life of the mind, once figured with images of isolation, of ivory towers, monasteries, and a hermit's cave, here assumes a more public, faster-paced visage. I hope to see a whirl of activity on these screens, not just the bloodless publication of scholarship, but the embodied and enacted, contested and appreciated, performance of scholarship.

An interesting complication: Ty spoke with Jenny about our project, and our desire to make liberal use of materials on her site. She didn't much like the idea. Her site went dark for a day or two, and she published a revision with a different URL. The new page radically deemphasizes smoking by announcing itself as a "lesbian page" rather than part of the "Smoking Fetish" WWWeb community. The Lolita pictures are gone, as are the "first time" narratives, and "Jenny" has added biographical details to convince browsers that she is Real. Nothing has changed, however; each of the five identities is still evinced, and the "Real Jenny" cannot "stand up." As Ty groused, "You
know, when Gingrich spouts I can take a good
snapshot of it, and ram criticism at it. But, here, you have to keep your mouth shut with the artifact because it thinks, it changes, it adapts--like a mood ring."

Revised 01/06/07 MCM