Hyper-Cartesians

Walter Truett Anderson suggests that postmoderns may be distinguished from others by the fact that they not only have a culture, but know that they have it. Or, put differently: “You do not choose to be premodern. If you choose, you are at least modern. If you know you are choosing, you are postmodern.”

Far from overcoming the Cartesian detachment of self from world, this feature of postmodernism seems to exaggerate it. You are not only detached from the cultural world in which you exist, as Descartes was; but you are also somehow detached from the self who chooses the cultural world in which you exist. You are not a ghost in the machine, but the wisp in the ghost in the machine.

On the other hand: Surely it says something important about human beings that we can know that we are choosing a cultural mode. This kind of self-transcendence, or self-difference, belies the notion that we are stuck in whatever cultural paradigm we were born with. Perhaps the problem with postmodern tribal epistemologies is that the selves they posit are still too centered.