But something more fundamental can be argued from the spirit of the works themselves, and in particular from a renewed scrutiny of the same high-modernist celebration of the self that the anti-political critics adduced to support a notion of the modernists' subjectivism (in this, they joined hands with the Stalinist tradition). I want, however, to propose the alternative proposition that modernism's introspective probing of the deeper impulses of consciousness, and even of the unconscious itself, was always accompanied by a Utopian sense of the impending transformation or transfiguration of the "self" in question. "You have to change your life!"Rilke's archaic Greek torso tells him paradigmatically; and D. H. Lawrence is filled with intimations of this momentous new sea change from which new people are sure to emerge. What we now have to grasp is that those feelings, expressed in connection with the self, could only come into being in correlation with a similar feeling about society and the object world itself. It is because that object world, in the throes of industrialization and modernization, seems to tremble at the brink of an equally momentous and even Utopian transformation that the "self" can also be felt to be on the point of change. For this is not merely the moment of Taylorization and the new factories; it also marks the emergence of most of Europe into a parliamentary system in which new and vast working-class parties play their part for the first time, and feel themselves, particularly in Germany, on the point of achieving hegemony. Perry Anderson has argued persuasively that modernism in the arts (although he rejects the category of modernism as such for other reasons) is intimately related to the winds of change blowing from the great new radical social movements. High modernism does not express those values as such; rather it emerges in a space opened by them, and its formal values of the New and of innovation, along with its Utopian sense of the transfiguration of the self and the world, are, in ways that remain to be explored, very much to be seen as echoes and resonances of the hopes and optimism of that great period dominated by the Second International. As for the works themselves, John Berger's exemplary essays on cubism goffer a more detailed analysis of the way in which this seemingly very formalist new painting is infused by a Utopian spirit that will be crushed by the grisly uses of industrialization on the battlefields of World War I. This new Utopianism is only in part a glorification of new machinery, as in futurism; it expresses itself across a gamut of impulses and excitement that ultimately touch on the impending transformation of society itself.

I think we now have to talk about the relief of the postmodern generally, a thunderous unblocking of logjams and a release of new productivity that was somehow tensed up and frozen, locked like cramped muscles, at the latter end of the modern period. This release was something a good deal more momentous than a mere generational change (any number of generations having succeeded themselves during the gradually canonical reign of the modern proper), although it also did something to the collective sense of what "generations" were in the first place. One cannot too often symbolically underscore the moment (in most U.S. universities, the late 1950s or early 1960s) in which the modern "classics" entered the school system and the college reading lists (before that, we read Pound on our own, English departments only laboriously reaching Tennyson). This was a kind of revolution in its own way, with unexpected consequences, forcing the recognition of the modern texts at the same time that it defused them, like former radicals finally appointed to the cabinet.

The other definition of reification that has been important in recent years is the "effacement of the traces of production" from the object itself, from the commodity thereby produced. This sees the matter from the standpoint of the consumer: it suggests the kind of guilt people are freed from if they are able not to remember the work that went into their toys and furnishings. Indeed, the point of having your own object world, and walls and muffled distance or relative silence all around you, is to forget about all those innumerable others for a while; you don't want to have to think about Third World women every time you pull yourself up to your word processor, or all the other lower-class people with their lower-class lives when you decide to use or consume your other luxury products: it would be like having voices inside your head; indeed, it "violates" the intimate space of your privacy and your extended body. For a society that wants to forget about class, therefore, reification in this consumer-packaging sense is very functional indeed; consumerism as a culture involves much more than this, but this kind of "effacement" is surely the indispensable precondition on which all the rest can be constructed.

This is an objective dialectic that populists have often found repellent and which has often been more narrowly rehearsed in the form of the paradox or the paralogism: the emergent groups as so many new markets for new products, so many new interpellations for the advertising image itself. Is not the fast-food industry the unexpected solution -- as with philosophy, its fulfillment and abolition all at once -- to the debate on pay for housework? Are minority quotas not to be understood first and foremost as the allocation of segments of television time, and is not the production of the appropriate new group-specific products the truest recognition a business society can bring to its others? Finally, then, is not the very logic of capitalism itself ultimately as dependent on the equal right to consumption as it once was to the wage system or a uniform set of juridical categories applicable to everyone? Or, on the other hand, if individualism is really dead after all, is not late capitalism so hungry and thirsty for Luhmannian differentiation and the endless production and proliferation of new groups and neoethnicities of all kinds as to qualify it as the only truly "democratic" and certainly the only "pluralistic" mode of production?

That the "new social movements" are postmodern, insofar as they are effects and consequences of "late capitalism," is however virtually a tautology which has no evaluative function. What is sometimes characterized as a nostalgia for class politics of some older type is generally more likely to be simply a "nostalgia" for politics tout court: given the way in which periods of intense politization and subsequent periods of depolitization and withdrawal are modeled on the great economic rhythms of the boom and bust of the business cycle, to describe this feeling as "nostalgia" is about as adequate as to characterize the body's hunger, before dinner, as a "nostalgia for food."

I hear the wind carrying a siren's call. I'm all alone.... At this very instant there are boats on the open sea that are echoing with music; lights are going on in all the cities of Europe; Communists and Nazis are fighting in the streets of Berlin, unemployed workers are pounding the pavement in New York, women, sitting in front of their mirrors, in a warm room, are putting shadow on their eyelids. And I'm here, in this empty street, and every shot that rings out of a window in Neukolln, every bloody gasp from wounded bodies being carried away, the most minute gestures of those women making themselves up, syncopates each one of my footsteps, each heartbeat of my heart.

This pseudoexperience, which must be marked as a fantasy and as a failure to achieve representation (by means of representation), is also a second-degree, reactive effort, an attempt to recuperate what lies beyond the reach of my own senses and life experience and, drawing that back inside, to become, if not self-sufficient, then at least protectively selfcontained, like a hedgehog. It seems at the same time to be a relatively aimless and exploratory fantasy as well, as though the subject were afraid of forgetting something but could not quite imagine the consequences: Will I be punished if I forget all the others busy living simultaneously with me? What benefit could I possibly derive from doing so when it is in any case impossible to do the job right? Nor would the achievement of conscious synchronicity enhance my own immediate situation, since by definition the mind overleaps that toward others personally unknown to me (and therefore, in the detail of their existences, by definition unimaginable). The effort is thus voluntaristic, an assault of the will on what is "by definition" structurally impossible of achievement rather than something pragmatic and practical that seeks to augment my information about the here and now. The Sartrean character would seem to have launched a preemptive strike or probe: to imagine, mentally to encompass in advance, those numerical multitudes that, ignored, might otherwise ontologically overwhelm you.

In my opinion, a closer new look at the modern would disclose the root of its distinctive experience of temporality in the modernization processes and dynamics of turn-of-the-century capitalism, with its glorious new machinery (celebrated by the futurists and so many others, but no less dramatically deplored and demonized by other writers we also call "modernists"), which has nonetheless not yet completely colonized the social space in which it is emergent. Arno Mayer has reminded us, with a salutary shock, of the persistence of the old regime well up into the twentieth century, and the very partial nature of the "triumph of the bourgeoisie" or of industrial capitalism in the modernist period, still predominantly rural and at least statistically dominated by peasants and landlords with feudal habits, among which the occasional motorcar strikes a jarring but exciting note, along with intermittent electrification and even the sparse aviational pyrotechnics of World War I. First and foremost of the great oppositions not yet overcome by capitalism in this period is therefore that between town and country, and the subjects or citizens of the high-modern period are mostly people who have lived in multiple worlds and multiple times -- a medieval pays to which they return on family vacations and an urban agglomeration whose elites are, at least in most advanced countries, trying to "live with their century" and to be as "absolutely modern" as they know how. The very value of the New and of innovation (as these are reflected in everything from First World hermetic forms to the great drama of Old and New played out variously in the Third and Second World countries) clearly enough presupposes the exceptionality of what is felt to be "modern"; while deep memory itself, which inscribes and scars the differentiation of experience into time and evokes something like the intermittencies of alternate worlds, would seem also to depend on "uneven development" of an existential and psychic, fully as much as on an economic, kind. Nature is related to memory not for metaphysical reasons but because it throws up the concept and the image of an older mode of agricultural production that you can repress, dimly remember, or nostalgically recover in moments of danger and vulnerability.

Memory, temporality, the very thrill of the "modern" itself, the New, and innovation are thus all casualties of this process in which not only Mayer's residual ancien regime is obliterated but even classical bourgeois culture of the belle epoque is liquidated. Akira Asada's proposition is thus even more grimly profound than it is witty, that the usual figuration for the stages of capitalism (early, mature, late or advanced) is a misnomer that ought to be reversed: the earliest years now being designated as senile capitalism because it is still the affair of boring traditionalists from an older world; mature or adult capitalism would then retain its characterization, in order to reflect the coming into their own of the great robber barons and adventurers; whereas our own, hitherto late, period can henceforth be known as "infantile capitalism," inasmuch as everyone has been born into it, takes it for granted, and has never known anything else, the friction, resistance, effort of the earlier moments having given way to the free play of automation and the malleable fungibility of multiple consumer publics and markets: roller skates and multinationals, word processors and overnight unfamiliar postmodern downtown high rises.

For while high technology is omnipresent and unavoidable, particularly in its various religious forms, decadence compels by its absence, like a smell nobody mentions or a thought all the guests are visibly making an effort not to think. One would have thought that the world of headphones and Andy Warhol, of fundamentalism and AIDS, of exercise machines and MTV, yuppies and books on Postmodernism, punk hairdos and fifties' -style crewcuts, the "loss of historicity" and the eloge of schizophrenia, the media and obsessions with calcium and cholesterol, the logic of "future shock" and the emergence of scientists and counterinsurgency strike forces as new types of social groups, would have all the qualifications to pass for ripely decadent in the eyes of any sensible Martian observer; but it is corny to say so, and one of the other tactical achievements of the postmodern discursive system lies in the relegation of the laudator temporis acti to the storeroom of no longer very plausible or believable literary characters. To be sure, where the former norm has become just another "life-style," the category of the eccentric loses its reason for being; but the moderns still had this concept, which they sometimes acted out in a way that in our time only Fellini's great Satyricon recaptures, in the guise of a "nostalgia film" about the late Roman Empire, with this signal difference: that the nostalgia may somehow be real, in which case it must be identified as a hitherto unknown and unclassified species of feeling altogether (unless the whole thing is simply a costume remake of La Dolce Vita; in which case Fellini is just another moralizer without interest, something his film disproves by triumphantly eschewing the narcissistic pathos of its contemporary counterpart). Fellini here manages to construct a time machine in which we can still seize a glimpse not of the world as lived by the decadent Romans of the silver age but of that of high Modernists (at least in their first symbolist stage), who unlike us could still think the concept of decadence concretely and with Flaubertian force. Meanwhile, as Richard Gilman pertinently reminds us, 40 the Romans in question had no such concept, and unlike the character in the costume drama who announces that he is off for the Thirty Years' War, but like ourselves, the postmoderns, were very far from pinching themselves at every moment to remind themselves that they were living "in the Decadence."

Whence, then, this strange inner shadow or opacity within the modern of the decadence itself? Why should proud modern -- or modernist -- people, at best merely apprehensive about their insufficient modernity, harbor this secret fantasy of languid, neurasthetic difference, with which they then go on to tax the more ancient provinces in their empire, not to speak of their own "most advanced" artists and cultural intellectuals? Decadence is clearly something which both resists modernity and comes after it, as a future destiny in which all the promises of the modern go slack and unravel. The concept fantasizes the return of all the weirdest religious sects and foods, after the triumph of the secular, of homo economicus and of utilitarianism: it is thus the ghost of the superstructure, of cultural autonomy itself, that haunts the omnipotence of the base. "Decadence" is thus in some way the very premonition of the postmodern itself, but under conditions that make it impossible to predict that aftermath with any sociological or cultural accuracy, thereby diverting the vague sense of a future into more fantastic forms, all borrowed from the misfits and eccentrics, the perverts and the Others, or aliens, of the present (modern) system. In history, finally, or rather in the historical unconscious, "decadence" comes before us as the ineradicable otherness of the past and of other modes of production -- an otherness posited by capitalism as such, but which it now, as it were, tries on, as with old costumes, since these ancient decadents (who have no concept of decadence themselves) are the others of an other, the difference of a difference: they look at their own surroundings with our eyes, seeing nothing but what is morbidly exotic, but complicitous and finally infected by that, so that the roles slowly reverse and it is we moderns who become "decadent" against the backdrop of the more natural realities of the precapitalist landscape.

Where nature has vanished, however, and along with it the very "otherness" that one can find offensive in the hubris and the exceptionalist ideology of modernity, the concept of decadence must then itself fade away, no longer available for characterizing and expressing our reactions to the postmodern. What seems to persist, on the other hand, is the historiographic stage set of all those "ends of the world" that lent the decadent moment its peculiar resonance and, as it were, its silver note. Late capitalism is in that sense a misnomer, insofar as "late" now yields none of the fin-de-sibcle or late-Roman overtones we associate with it, nor are its subjects fantasized as being faint and listless with too much experience and history, too much jouissance and too many rare and occult intellectual and scientific operations. We have all those things, indeed, but we jog afterward to refresh the constitution, while by the same token computers relieve us of the terrible obligation to distend the memory like a swollen bladder retaining all these encyclopedia references.