Abstract
This chapter offers a (traditional) theory of “theory.” It argues that, in seeking to overcome the situation of the modern subject and its imperial aims, it actually articulated their fulfillment—but on a plane of virtuality sustained by new technologies of representation as they converge with developing biotechnologies. Put starkly, if somewhat speculatively: if the project of progress aimed to replace the divine Maker by remaking (hence, owning) what nature provided, how much more complete will that replacement be if accomplished by cloned and genetically engineered (human?) beings living online in digitized virtual worlds of their own design? Regardless of the yet-to-be-determined practical limitations on this prospect—the logic of the historical argument, going back to Descartes sixth discourse, seems undeniable. And postmodern theory did not arise accidently in the context of these new technologies and the social and political developments they have engendered. In accordance with Hegel’s little aphorism on the title page (“philosophy is an age grasped in thought”), postmodern theory arose because it reflects and inflects those developments—thereby giving us as conscious agents some leverage, however slight, on the situation into which we have all been thrown.
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Notes
- 1.
Ray Kurzweil and Larry Page (co-founder of Google) are only the most prominent figures seriously preparing for a time in the near future when it will be possible to “upload” (or “download”?) a mind/brain onto a computer.
- 2.
At the end of Subjects of Desire (1987), Judith Butler rightly asks if French theory managed to escape Hegel after all. She echoed Foucault concluding his inaugural address at the Collegede France: “We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us” (“Discourse on Language” 1971, 235). See the last paragraph of this chapter for my own experience of this Hegelian effect.
- 3.
“I will suppose … that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams. … I will consider myself as without hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or any of the senses, and as falsely believing that I am possessed of these” (1975 (1641), 100).
- 4.
Compare Fredric Jameson on “pastiche” and “surface” in The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).
References
Butler, Judith. 1987. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in 20th-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press.
Descartes, Rene. 1968. The Discourse on Method (1637) and the Meditations (1641). Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.
Foucault, Michel. 1971. The Discourse on Language. In The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.
Haraway, Donna. (1985) 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lilla, Mark. 2015. The Strangely Conservative French. Review of How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People by Sudhir Hazareesingh. New York Review of Books 62, 16.
Locke, John. (1689) 1996. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Abridged and ed. Kenneth P. Winkler. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
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de Zengotita, T. (2019). Before the Annunciation Came the Virtual. In: Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90689-8_11
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