PARA/ INQUIRY Postmodern Religion and Culture Victor E ... - IMIC

writer therefore work without rules and in order to establish the rules [règles] for what will havebeen made. This is why the work and the text can take on the properties of an event; it is alsowhy they would arrive too late for their author, or, in what amounts to the same thing, why thework of making them would always begin too soon. Post-modern would be understandingaccording to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo). 10The peculiarity of the age of postmodernism is that one may anxiously await that which hasalready arrived [de là aussi qu’ils arrivent trop tard pour leur auteur, ou, ce qui revient au même,que leur mise en oeuvre commence toujours trop tôt]. And, since it has already arrived, it is yetto arrive. Or, its arrival marks its “not yetness.” This paradox, for Lyotard, presents itself inmodern art. Modern art was postmodern before it was modern. That is to say, modern art waspostmodern as long as it did not discover and obey its rules: “Thus understood,postmodernism is not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state isrecurrent” 11 [Le postmodernisme ainsi entendu n’est pas le modernisme à sa fin, mais à l’étatnaissant, et cet état est constant]. If one returns for some clarification to Lyotard’s earlierbook, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, this paradoxical event appears, notas an historical event, but as an event outside of linearity. Lyotard’s subtitle is fitting giventhat he is addressing a crisis in thought; an epistemological and political crisis that is linkedto larger or grander narratives of an “age.” Again, this is not to say that Lyotard is justreporting on the state of knowledge; he is reporting on the condition of knowledge.Simply understood, postmodern is that collection of historical events that take place aftermodernism. The “post” in this instance merely indicates a conclusion to the modern and thebeginning of something afterward and new, postmodernism. This initial and, albeit, literal16reading of the “post” depends upon a pre-thought or a condition of thinking which makespossible “history” as a linear progression and procession of happenings, events that can berun together as a continuity from ontos to telos. This continuity, Borges’s enumeration, is notassumed in Lyotard’s report on knowledge. For Lyotard, the postmodern comes before themodern in the sense that it occurred as a condition and not as an event in a sequence ofevents. How is this non-linearity possible? The postmodern, for Lyotard, is that instance ofinstability “prior” to the concretization of rules. It is “before” the event, the writing, the art, isjoined to a rule or a grand narrative.In drawing our attention to the condition of knowledge – that it is conditioned by a largerdiscursive practice – Lyotard actually postpones the arrival of the postmodern by indicatingthat, once an event is linked, finds a place beneath the rule, it ceases to be postmodern. Thepostmodern, then, takes events to be particles within an infinite flux of data. Each event hasan undirected trajectory in this flux until it is linked to a grand narrative. The infinite stream ofdata is cut, and that portion is grafted onto one or many discursive structures. Theapportionment, however, is not ontologically determined: “Enchaîner est nécessaire, unenchaïnement ne l’est pas.” 12 That the event must be linked is not the same as dictating how itis to be linked. It is at this point that Lyotard identifies the condition of knowledge as in crisis.Events are likely to be linked to the dominant or grand narratives of the time. These totalizingdiscourses eclipse the event-particle by totalizing the unstable field of data. These grandnarratives attempt to exhaust the infinite stream of data, excluding and delegitimating anyand all links that do not fit the direction of the grand narrative itself. Or, as Lyotard hasdescribed it, postmodernism is “ … an incredulity toward metanarratives.” 13Postmodern inquiry, para/inquiry, one could argue from this particular definition, is not the