Postmodernism in Philosophy and Music

July 20, 2017 / rev. 2025

The difficulty of defining postmodernism etymologically or historically underscores its fluidity and the multiplicity of perspectives shaping its discourse. Rather than adhering to a singular interpretation, this essay engages in a comparative theoretical analysis of postmodernism in music, placing Mahnkopf’s critique in dialogue with Hassan’s literary schematization, Rorty’s rejection of metaphysical absolutes, and Kramer’s framework for postmodern music. The discussion extends into surrealist aesthetics, drawing on Freud and Lacan’s notions of the unconscious to explore parallels between musical and artistic modernism. Schoenberg’s historical positioning relative to surrealism serves as a case study in this trajectory, while Berio’s reflections on musical language highlight tensions between tradition, transmission, and utopian ideals. Rather than imposing a rigid historical or ideological framework, the aim is to examine how these diverse perspectives illuminate the substantive challenges and possibilities postmodernism presents to notions of musical progress, autonomy, and truth, rather than imposing a simplistic definition.

“Postmodernism,” as a term, is historically and morphologically bound to Modernism. It is customary to introduce it as a heterogenous “movement” evoking “a number of related cultural tendencies, a constellation of values, [and] a repertoire of procedures and attitudes,” [1] which arose in reaction to and out of modernism—more specifically, in reaction to certain dominant, though by no means monolithic, tenets of twentieth-century modernism, particularly its perceived investment in operating “leftover” Enlightenment projects concerned with “truth.” On a morphological aspect, Jurgen Habermas qualifies “modern” as a term that “appeared and reappeared exactly during those periods in Europe when the consciousness of a new epoch formed itself through a renewed relationship to the ancients – whenever, moreover, antiquity was considered a model to be recovered through some kind of imitation.”[2] Therefore, defined in its broadest way, modernism borrows a term that has been freely adopted throughout history, which furthermore, simply characterizes the present and contemporary as opposed to the past and antiquity. Under this light, it makes little sense to speak of post-modernism as post-present or post-contemporary, thus barring one from simple etymological definitions.

Postmodernism's relationship with the past is not one of dismissal, but of radical re-engagement. It treats history as a text to be actively re-read and re-described, rather than as a stable truth to be uncovered. This is why a key concern for a philosopher like Jacques Derrida is the act of infinite re-interpretation. Far from being ahistorical, this perspective acknowledges that central postmodern ideas like fragmentation and multiplicity have deep roots, appearing in thought and writing long before the 20th century. Tracing postmodern tendencies back in time, one could arrive at Friedrich Nietzsche, who persuasively attacked nineteenth-century European uniformity, thus supplying a dominant contemporary philosophical precedent for postmodernism. It is in Nietzsche that postmodern theories (e.g. Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard) typically find an ally who equally “emphasizes the deep chaos of modern life and its intractability before rational thought.” [3] Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s philosophy is not linear and self-consistent, since in the particulars, Nietzsche cultivates various ambiguities and contradictions. His influence on postmodern theories, at least in my view, is less that of a “traditional” philosopher propounding a unified theory, than that of a poet, writing intense, emotionally charged “aphoristic” concepts. Recognizing this complexity is key, as it foreshadows postmodernism's own skeptical stance towards unified, seamless philosophical systems.

Similarly, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger — to name but a few core philosophers considered precursors to postmodernism — complicate matters even further. Each philosopher, operating unknowably in the radius of postmodern debates-to-come, fractalizes the idea of constructing a unified (whole) theory of postmodernism. Therefore, it should be no surprise that arriving at a definition of postmodernism is difficult, precisely because on one hand, the term’s etymology is malleable, and on the other, it offers fragmentary historical precedents that are difficult to coalesce into a coherent definition.

A more fertile (practical, yet equally fragmentary) approach in defining postmodernism entails displaying its contrasting relationship to twentieth-century modernism, while bypassing the problematic historical excavations. This method usually results in juxtaposing schematic differences between prominent twentieth-century works and concepts. Literary theorist Ihab Hassan conveniently schematizes some of the differences in Table 1, presented here not as fixed definitions but as a useful heuristic tool to highlight common tendencies often contrasted under these banners. This table “draws on ideas in many fields – rhetoric, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, political science, even theology – and draws on many authors European and American – aligned with diverse movements, groups and views.” [4]

Modernism

Romanticism/Symbolism, Form (conjunctive, closed), Purpose, Design, Hierarchy, Mastery/Logos, Art Object/Finished Work, Distance, Creation/Totalization, Synthesis, Presence, Centering, Genre/Boundary, Semantics, Paradigm, Hypotaxis, Metaphor, Selection, Root/Depth, Interpretation/Reading, Signified, Lisible (Readerly), Narrative/Grande Histoire, Master Code, Symptom, Type, Genital/Phallic, Paranoia, Origin/Cause, God the Father, Metaphysics, Determinacy, Transcendence.

Post-Modernism

Pataphysics/Dadaism, Antiform (disjunctive, open), Play, Chance, Anarchy, Exhaustion/Silence, Process/Performance/Happening, Participation, Decreation/Deconstruction, Antithesis, Absence, Dispersal, Text/Intertext, Rhetoric, Syntagm, Parataxis, Metonymy, Combination, Rhizome/Surface, Against Interpretation/Misreading, Signifier, Scriptible (Writerly), Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire, Idiolect, Desire, Mutant, Polymorphous/Androgynous, Schizophrenia, Difference-Differance/Trace, The Holy Ghost, Irony, Indeterminacy, Immanence.

Table 1. Hassan’s schematic differences between modernism and postmodernism. [5]

Hassan further qualifies the table by adding that the “dichotomies this table represents remain insecure, equivocal. For differences shift, defer, even collapse; concepts in any one vertical column are not all equivalent; and inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and postmodernism, abound.” [6] This inherent fluidity, acknowledged by theorists like Hassan, is central to postmodern thought but often misinterpreted by critics as mere inconsistency or a lack of substance, rather than as a reflection of the unstable cultural and semiotic ground postmodernism explores. Hassan cautions that although postmodernism exists as a designation, it should not be taken wholesale as if it represented a homogenous movement. Therefore, for all practical purposes, a definition cannot be found, since at best, one can only discern fluid and insecure dichotomies, but never “truth” statements. The same definitional problems plague music that has been influenced by postmodern thought. In fact, music may fare even worse, since it is not clear the degree to which a linguistic comparison is justified.

The problem of definition in music is itself nothing new; it harks back to problematic and dubious associations of musical periods with their historical counterparts in other areas. Impressionism in painting and Impressionism in music, to take a popular example, are concepts that converge in order to help introduce composers like Debussy in introductory music courses. However, if minimal scrutiny is exerted, one must dismiss the comparison as useless and misguided, as did Debussy himself. [7] Writers addressing postmodernism in music, incapable of reaching a satisfactory unified definition, have also been resorting to schematic comparisons.

To my knowledge, the most thorough book on postmodernism in music was written by theorist-composer Jonathan D. Kramer, and published in 2016, posthumously under the title Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening. The first sentence of the book immediately rings the familiar bells of undecidability:

“Postmodernism is a maddeningly imprecise musical concept. Does the term refer to a period or an aesthetic, a listening attitude or a compositional practice? […] And, simply, what is musical postmodernism? […] Many composers I know use “postmodernism” in the corrupted sense of the press, in apparent ignorance of the thinking of critical theorists such as Eco or Lyotard. Yet the ideas of such writers are relevant to today’s postmodern music. A more subtle and nuanced understanding of postmodernism emerges once we consider it not as a historical period but as an attitude.” [8]

Just like Hassan, Kramer (understandably) proceeds to enumerate postmodern musical traits – again, understood here as a heuristic summary of associated tendencies rather than a definitive checklist – in the hopes of contrasting them from other types of works. Kramer considers postmodernism to be an attitude and not a historical period; this view would consider Beethoven, for example, as a postmodernist given that it is the listener’s ethos that grants Beethoven’s work its authority and not the other way around. Since Kramer is mainly interested in discerning a postmodern attitude of listening, his enumerated traits occupy an ambiguous position that is more dependent on the listening subject, and less dependent on a priori assumption of traits. While this focus usefully shifts the locus of postmodernism towards reception, it admittedly poses methodological challenges in definitively identifying such an attitude; this essay therefore utilizes Kramer's traits primarily as descriptive of compositional practices often associated with fostering or inviting this attitude.

Musical Postmodernism

1. is not simply a repudiation of modernism or its continuation, but has aspects of both

2. Is, on some level and in some way, ironic

3. Does not respect boundaries between sonorities and procedures of the past and of the present

4. Seeks to break down barriers between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” styles

5. Shows disdain for the often unquestioned value of structural unity

6. Refuses to accept the distinction between elitist and populist values

7. Avoids totalizing forms (e.g., does not allow an entire piece to be tonal or serial or cast in a prescribed formal mold)

8. Includes quotations of or references to music of many traditions and cultures

9. Embraces contradictions

10. Distrusts binary oppositions

11. Includes fragmentations and discontinuities

12. Encompasses pluralism and eclecticism

13. Presents multiple meanings and multiple temporalities

14. Locates meaning and even structure in listeners, more than in scores, performances, or composers

Table 2. Kramer’s list enumerating postmodern traits in music. [9] 

This same list was first included on the 1996 issue of Indiana Theory Review. [10] However, twenty years later, Kramer more appropriately comments on the list with a cautionary addendum. Here, one should notice the similarity with Hassan’s approach:

“[…] I would encourage my readers to consider the nature of these traits, the way they overlap and refuse to form neat categories, rather than to be put off by the unpostmodern appearance of a list. […] These traits try to circumscribe the postmodern attitude, which is manifest in a variety of ways and to a variety of degrees, in a large amount of music produced today (and yesterday); but the traits cannot really define specific pieces as postmodern or not, or even as postmodern to a particular degree. […] Postmodernism resides in cultural values and in people—listeners—but not in pieces of music.” [11]

Kramer’s list represents the kernel of his observations regarding postmodern music, consequently, he spends the rest of the book elucidating it. Of particular interest is Kramer’s observation that postmodern music could be conceived as a delayed counterpart to the European visual surrealism of the 1920s. Substituting one term for the other is problematic, but allows borrowing some interpretative tools that have been in circulation since the early twentieth century.

“Surrealist visual artists justified their work with reference to the unconscious and to dreams. While postmodern composers—whose presentational music may be more engaged with its surfaces than with its deep interior—do not often invoke Freudian analogies when discussing their compositions, a lot of postmodern music is decidedly free-associational. In addition, postmodern music rich in quotations can have a dream-like temporal quality, in which fragments of prior listening experiences float by in strange ways.” [12]

A plausible connection between Postmodern music and Surrealism exists, yet it obscures a core theoretical difference centered on the structure of the unconscious. This difference marks a fundamental theoretical shift: from the Modernist goal of seeking to express a presumed truth (the signified) to the Postmodern condition of operating within the differential network of language (the signifier).

The postmodern framework, primarily influenced by Lacan’s reading of Freud, binds the unconscious to this symbolic order of signifiers. As Dylan Evans clarifies, the symbolic is a linguistic dimension in which "elements have no positive existence but which are constituted purely by virtue of their mutual differences.” [13] In this view, there is no unmediated meaning to be "expressed," only a web of signs to be navigated.

To fully appreciate the departure this represents, one must consider the Surrealist position it supplanted. Surrealist artists interpreted Freud’s theories in a more “expressionistic” manner, focusing squarely on the signified-dimension of language. For them, meaning was presumed to be recoverable. Acknowledging the ultimate mystery of the unconscious, the artist was to become a surrogate for its automatic structures. Andre Breton’s first “Manifesto of Surrealism” from 1924 defines the project along these exact lines:

“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. [..] Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest […] Therefore, I am defining it once and for all: SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” [14]

In music, to my knowledge, the most powerful defense of surrealism is written by none other than Arnold Schoenberg, who is not associated with surrealism at all, but with expressionism (which in my view is simply another “flavor” of Freudian interpretation). In two letters sent to Feruccio Busoni in August 1909, Schoenberg articulates sentiments strikingly resonant with the core tenets of the later Surrealist manifestos:

“I am writing in such detail because I want to declare my intentions […] I strive for: complete liberation of all forms from all symbols of cohesion and of logic. Thus: away with ‘motivic working out’. Away with harmony as cement or bricks of a building. Harmony is expression and nothing else. Then: Away with Pathos! Away with protracted ten-ton scores, erected or constructed, towers, rocks and other massive claptrap. My music must be brief. Concise! In two notes, not built but ‘expressed’!! […] And this variegation, this multifariousness, this illogicality which our senses demonstrate, the illogicality presented by their interactions, set forth by some mounting rush of blood, by some reaction of the sense or the nerves, this I should like to have in my music. It should be an expression of feeling, as our feelings, which bring us in contact with our subconscious, really are, and no false child of feelings and ‘conscious logic.’ […] My only intention is to have no intentions! No formal, architectural or other artistic intentions […], no aesthetic intentions – none of any kind; at most this: to place nothing inhibiting in the stream of my unconscious sensations. But to allow anything to infiltrate which may be invoked either by intelligence or consciousness.”[15] 

Had Schoenberg followed through the consequences of his statement, I believe it would have resulted in a revolution easily on par with his twelve-tone method. However, it is certain that Schoenberg merely wished to attain this state of automatic surrealist composing. Pitch-class analysis of Schoenberg’s early atonal works reveals a sound musical logic concerned with building structural coherence via set repetitions related by transposition.

Fig.1: Set Class analysis and transpositional operations in the piano part of Schoenberg's Op.15, no.1.

A brief examination of the first piece from The Book of Hanging Gardens [16], his landmark 1908 cycle for voice and piano, reveals an underlying harmonic-teleological thread based on the principle of comprehensibility via pitch-class repetitions and returns. Consequently, even when motivic cohesion is hard to detect, one can observe a ubiquitous Schoenbergian pre-twelve-tone trait of building structural coherence through long-range harmonic repetition. However, this not-so-illogical coherence puts his music at odds with his written intentions—and the Freudian current that feeds his music. This is not to say Schoenberg was naive about the difficulties of his medium; rather, it highlights a theoretical shift. For the expressionist, the primary obstacle to be overcome was the rational ego, in order to access a deeper psychic truth. For the postmodernist, the obstacle is language itself—the signifying system which has no 'outside' and thus no deeper truth to access.

This very divergence illustrates a key point later emphasized by postmodern critique: the assumption of a direct, unmediated line to unconscious 'truth' (a fixed structure to be expressed) is complicated by the constraints and constructive nature of the artistic medium itself (the signifying system). Schoenberg’s Freudian psychoanalytic proclivity is the same one that fed Salvador Dalí and other Surrealists in the early twentieth century. Like Schoenberg’s expressionism, a Surrealist interpretation of Freud is grounded in the notion of “expressing” unknowable yet absolute structures. Moreover, both Breton’s and Schoenberg’s texts highlight the notion that something can be expressed directly, as if a straight, unmediated line between a symbol (signifier), e.g. a sound, and a listening subject existed. Even if the methods and results between postmodern and 1920s Surrealist (and Expressionist) works seem to converge, it is this rejection of unmediated truth that, more than any list of traits, ultimately defines the postmodern attitude.

In another attempt at defining postmodernism in music, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf also adopts a schematic approach. Mahnkopf describes the main features of postmodernism in music in his 2011 article “Musical Modernity from Classical Modernity up to the Second Modernity—Provisional Considerations.” (Table 3)

Postmodern Characteristics 

1. The postmodern musical work is hedonistic; it displays an enjoyment of its own combinatorial imagination with a certain frivolous air unique to music; its reception occurs in the mode of pleasure (e.g., Kagel, Match). 

2. The postmodern musical work is narrative; it presents a musical narrative, not a composition of sounds or structures (e.g., Rihm, Musik für drei Streicher).

3. The postmodern musical work is formally heteronomous, i.e., the difficult problem of form is solved, this being achieved through a strong connection to previously existing and functioning forms (e.g., Ligeti, Passacaglia ungherese). 

4. The postmodern musical work refers outside of itself; its material is taken from other music (e.g., Schnittke, Third String Quartet). 

5. The postmodern musical work is ironic, and thus pushes artistic truth towards a distortion of the truth and shows that what is presented is not intended in the way it is presented (e.g., Thomas Adès, Brahms).

Postmodernism Types

a. Poly-stylistic postmodernity: here the dominant aspect is pluralism, and thus the availability of different historical periods.

b. Ironic postmodernity: the main intention is that of travesty, parody, irony and excess 

c. Hybrid postmodernity: crossover effects are intended, primarily with forms of music outside of European art music (e.g., pop music or “world music”)

d. “Naïve” postmodernity: this does not react to the developments of modernity or the avant-garde because it does not, or does not want to, recognize them. Examples are neo-traditionalism and some minimalism 

e. "Bad” postmodernity: this would be an expression of formlessness, a proximity to trash, amateurism, and charlatanry 

f. "Epigonal postmodernity: this would be a form of “New Music light”– not primarily poly-stylistic or ironic, but drawing on material from an earlier generation, especially atonal music (in contrast to the postmodern preference for tonal music in the 1970s) 

Table 3. Mahnkopf’s schematization listing characteristics and traits in postmodern music. [17]

According to Mahnkopf, the more of these basic characteristics the work has, the more “one can speak of an integral postmodern work.” [18] To be clear, Mahnkopf's framework is not a simplistic anti-postmodern polemic. He is careful to position postmodernism as a historically necessary, if ultimately limited, intervention. He credits it as the "mischievous, playful" force that broke the deadlock of a "modernity that had become orthodox—blind, stubborn and unproductive." [19] His "Second Modernity," therefore, is not presented as a reactionary return to the past, but as a project that has absorbed the lessons of postmodernism's freedoms and now seeks to re-integrate them with a renewed commitment to compositional rigor and the "work concept." However, types d., e., and f. show that unlike Hassan and Kramer, Mahnkopf’s schematization introduces personal value judgments that critique postmodernism. While his attempt to categorize different modes of postmodern engagement (poly-stylistic, ironic, hybrid, etc.) points towards a genuine diversity worth acknowledging, his framework is ultimately shaped by these judgments and his subsequent defense of 'Second Modernity'. Mahnkopf acknowledges that the attitude towards “truth” is a crucial difference, since Second Modernity is “committed to the guiding principle of truth.” [19] His observations quickly devolve into painting contemporary life with broad strokes. Stark dualisms also proliferate, as in the instance where he declares that today’s postmodern culture “’plays the game of irony with pleasure’ and is geared towards ‘entertainment,’” whereas “the art of second modernity, stands in opposition to this in its emphasis on seriousness and artistic truth.” [20] Of particular note is Mahnkopf’s assertion that postmodernism’s inclusion of foreign material (e.g. quotations) can “at best only be combined ironically or playfully,” which moreover, “has grave consequences for the construction of the work[:] It remains meta-music, a piece of art rather than a genuine artwork.” [21]

I am not sure if Mahnkopf has changed his views on any of these declarations, but on the whole I find them unconvincing considering their lack of nuance and propensity towards using brash dualistic value judgments. I also find it easy to criticize his claims of “genuine and serious” artworks since he leaves much of the trajectory of those conclusions unexplained. American philosopher Richard Rorty presents an immediate and serious counter-punch to the multitude of truth declarations inhabiting Mahnkopf’s writing. Mahnkopf might argue that Rorty’s ironism collapses into relativism, making it difficult to establish a robust aesthetic framework. However, this potential objection misunderstands Rorty’s emphasis on contingency rather than nihilism. Moreover, one might question whether Mahnkopf’s Second Modernity truly offers a non-arbitrary framework or merely reinscribes a different form of aesthetic absolutism. Rorty’s challenge to the pursuit of absolute truth aligns closely with Derrida’s critique of Heidegger, particularly regarding the impossibility of unmediated meaning. As Rorty explains:

“Derrida thinks of Heidegger’s attempt to express the ineffable as merely the latest and most frantic form of a vain struggle to break out of language by finding words which take their meaning directly from the world, from non-language. This struggle has been going on since the Greeks, but it is doomed because language is, as Saussure says, nothing but differences. That is, words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words. ‘Red’ means what it does only by contrast with ‘blue’, ‘green’, etc. ‘Being’ also means nothing except by contrast, not only with ‘beings’ but with ‘Nature’, ‘God’, ‘Humanity’, and indeed every other word in the language. No word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might — by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form).” [22]

This understanding of language, where meaning arises from relational contrasts rather than direct representation, fundamentally challenges the notion that musical materials possess intrinsic, fixed 'truths' that a composition can autonomously express, as Mahnkopf seems to suggest.

Rorty’s interpretation of Derrida’s critique of Heidegger challenges Mahnkopf’s reliance on “truth” as a guiding principle for Second Modernity. If, as Rorty argues, meaning emerges through linguistic contrasts rather than from an external reality, then Mahnkopf’s notion of a self-contained, autonomous musical work becomes untenable. His claim that a composition can achieve pure artistic truth without engaging in external signification is difficult to sustain. Mahnkopf asserts that “the work is no more and no less than a form-fulfilling, autonomous application of material in musical time according to work-specific conceptions.” [23] Yet Rorty’s broader critique of metaphysics calls into question the very possibility of an autonomous and unmediated expression. If musical materials—both within and beyond a composition—function as signifiers in an endless signifying chain, their meanings remain contingent, unstable, and beyond the composer’s absolute control. Thus, from a Rortian perspective, Mahnkopf's ideal of a purely 'autonomous application of material' achieving 'genuine artistic truth' becomes problematic, overlooking the inescapable ways musical meaning is constructed through internal and external relationships, contexts, and the endless play of signification.

While Mahnkopf's overarching framework and value judgments warrant critique, his attempt to categorize different postmodern expressions gestures towards the diverse ways composers engage with this sensibility. His "Epigonal" type, for instance, points towards work (perhaps including aspects of my own, or even Mahnkopf's) that draws heavily on earlier avant-garde materials, such as atonality or complex serial procedures, but recontextualizes them. This differs from his "Poly-stylistic" or overtly "Ironic" types and is presented as a 'best of the worst' type category. However, viewed through the non-hierarchical lens offered by Rorty, framing such engagement as merely "epigonal" or "New Music light [lite]" misses and dismisses its potential. Instead, such work can be understood as a valid form of 'self-redescription, exploring modernist legacies through a contemporary, contingent lens rather than simply mimicking them or adhering to Mahnkopf’s prescribed notion of "Second Modernity." [25]

Rorty frames the philosophical debates around truth as the “difference of philosophical opinion between those who do and those who do not believe that truth consists in accurate representation of the intrinsic nature of reality.” [26] In the essay “Habermas, Derrida, and Philosophy,” [27] he replies to Jurgen Habermas’ objections that Derrida and other like-minded thinkers only promote a type of “subjective philosophy.” Although not discussed in Rorty’s essay, critics of postmodernism have further claimed that the obscurantist language of continental philosophy is a symptom of “‘the bullshitter’ [who] is prepared to speak and write in the requisite jargon, without any goal of getting things right.” [28] In Rorty’s estimation, Habermas is

“right in saying that the ironists’ [postmodernist’s] quest for ever deeper irony and ever more ineffable sublimity has little direct public utility. But I do not think this shows that “the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness is a symptom of exhaustion.’ What he sees as symptom of exhaustion I see as symptoms of vitality. This is because I read people like Heidegger and Nietzsche as good private philosophers, and he reads them as bad public philosophers.”

Rorty makes a crucial distinction between the private and the public. Hence, private ironizing is not meant to be taken as the solution to a public political discourse; moreover, the ironist should not be at fault for the consequences their readers extract from the work. If that were the case, let us burn all of Beethoven’s works since the Nazis made extensive use of his music for the purpose of fostering their racist ideology. According to Rorty, Habermas “demands that writers like Heidegger and Derrida provide a public justification of their own practice […] He wants to treat them as claiming what he calls ‘universal validity,’ whereas I regard the question of universal validity as irrelevant to their practices.” [29] Rorty's private/public distinction thus defends the ironist's practice not as failed public philosophy, but as a vital mode of private perfection.

Applying this to composition, it suggests that a composer's 'private' artistic project, their pursuit of self-creation through musical materials, does not require validation through fulfilling a specific 'public' function or conforming to external demands for universal communicability or historical necessity (such as those implied by Mahnkopf) to be considered a serious and valid endeavor. While a composer may write music that “makes more vivid and concrete our sense of what human life might be like in a democratic utopia – a utopia in which the quest for autonomy is impeded as little as possible by social institutions” [30] —that does not necessarily imply a grand statement about the impossibility of symbolic communication. This misunderstanding must have contributed toward Mahnkopf’s critique of postmodernism. Directly or indirectly, he discards postmodernism as “less serious” because it does not fit into HIS narrative of musical progress. This missed realization is rendered explicit in Rorty’s writings and critique of grand metaphysical narratives or final vocabularies. Even Luciano Berio, who is no stranger to postmodern practices, laments that:

"something is missing deep down in the consciousness of a number of young people which can, on the other hand, be found in anyone with a sense of history […] There ought to be acknowledgment of the elementary fact that musical languages also have to be transmitted, and a utopian vision of a common language that will allow music and musicians to speak and to be universally spoken. Without this covertly implied and perhaps unrealizable ideal, music cannot move, loses one of its dialectical reasons for existing and drifts from one mannerism to the next. It’s useful to search for things that we know we can’t find…” [31]

Berio’s admission that “it’s useful to search for things that we know we can’t find” is the crucial point here. He is not simply expressing a naive belief; he is acknowledging the functional, motivational power of an ideal he knows is unrealizable. Although Berio is closer to someone like Borges or Calvino in acknowledging a utopic project in the search for a common language, his lamenting signals a productive tension central to artistic creation: the desire for a shared foundation, even in the face of its perceived impossibility. Rorty’s reply to Berio would not dismiss this impulse but rather clarify its philosophical status. For Rorty, “the generic trait of ironists is that they do not hope to have their doubts about their final vocabularies settled by something larger than themselves. This means that their criterion of private perfection is autonomy rather than affiliation to a power other than themselves.” [32] This suggests a different, but equally rigorous, artistic goal: forging a unique voice through contingent materials, rather than striving for a potentially illusory universal language. This conception of autonomy, therefore, should not be equated with an egocentric practice. The composer's 'private perfection' is instead understood as the pursuit of internal coherence within a self-defined framework of contingent materials. The resulting work remains a potent vehicle for subjective experiences, but its meaning is generated without the metaphysical burden of appealing to a universal code.

Finally, I will extensively cite Rorty’s untangling of the philosophical knot which on one hand is in need of a complete epistemology, yet on the other recognizes the impossibility of attaining it outside the text.

“A metaphysician like Sartre may describe the ironist’s pursuit of perfection as a “futile passion,” but an ironist like Proust or Nietzsche will think that this phrase begs the crucial question. The topic of futility would arise only if one were trying to surmount time, chance, and self-description by discovering something more powerful than any of these. For Proust and Nietzsche, however, there is nothing more powerful or important than self-redescription. They are not trying to surmount time and chance, but to use them. They are quite aware that what counts as resolution, perfection, and autonomy will always be a function of when one happens to die or to go mad. But this relativity does not entail futility. For there is no big secret which the ironist hopes to discover, and which he might die or decay before discovering. There are only little mortal things to be rearranged by being redescribed.” [33]

For the contemporary composer, this concept of 'self-redescription' offers a powerful alternative to modernist narratives of progress or anxiety of influence. It frames the act of creation as a dynamic process of rearranging and reinterpreting 'little mortal things'—musical materials, influences, historical echoes—to forge contingent meaning and personal autonomy, providing a substantive artistic project beyond the pursuit of unattainable absolutes. Crucially, this process of 'rearranging little mortal things' is not limited to specific styles or materials. For a composer, self-redescription can involve grappling with complex modernist techniques, historical forms, or electronic sound just as readily as with pop fragments or explicit quotations. The defining factor is the attitude—one of contingent creation and private autonomy, rather than adherence to a predetermined historical narrative or the pursuit of a singular, objective artistic 'truth'. Importantly, embracing contingency and private autonomy does not equate to abandoning rigor; rather, it reframes rigor not as adherence to external absolutes or predetermined systems, but as the composer's dedicated craft and pursuit of internal coherence within their chosen, contingent framework of self-redescription. It is precisely through the rigor of this private perfection that a work capable of offering new, unexpected, and powerful public experiences is forged. This also allows for a deep engagement with, for example, the materials and rigor found in modernism but freed from its teleological and sometimes utopian burdens.

The fluidity of Hassan’s terms from Table 1 escape their existential dimensions in Rorty’s explication of private ironizing. Contrary to naïve generalizing, the arbitrary juxtaposing of kitschy materials, as observed in one vein of postmodernism, does not define all of postmodernism’s scope. Adopting Rorty’s language, we understand that self-redescription encompasses an infinitude of trajectories. We do not have to get transfixed in some absolutist vocabulary proclaimed to be internally consistent, nor limit our view of postmodern practice to its most easily caricatured examples. Self-redescription, as both a creative act and an interpretive possibility, highlights the dynamic engagement with meaning characteristic of a postmodern sensibility, extending from composer to work to listener.

Addendum

I read or dreamt that performance and praxis are mutually exclusive. How can it be? Anyways, it's summer and I've been having fun testing out some of the latest AI models. I fed it the prompt below and then edited the output across several (too many?) rounds. —EB, 2025

Starting Prompt: "Analyze the provided essay on music and postmodernism. Then, impersonate a diverse range of 'canonic' 20th-century intellectuals in response to it—postmodernists, their critics, Marxists, psychoanalysts, political theorists, and artists. Impersonate each figure with an authentic, nuanced voice, capturing their distinctive rhetorical style and theoretical concerns. Stage a multi-perspective dialogue in which these figures respond not only to the essay but to each other. Begin with Derrida, reacting 'off the record' to the meaning of a 'deep analysis.' Žižek should respond to multiple participants. Baudrillard must appear twice: first to critique the essay itself, and later to reflect on the very spectacle of the debate as it unfolds. Structure the conversation in three coherent acts, followed by a coda, and conclude with an unexpected twist.”

Simulated Debate

Part I: The Primary Analysis

A first wave of responses to the essay, establishing the core philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic positions.

Jacques Derrida:

“‘Deep analysis’? Even the phrase—its first breath, already a gesture—toward depth, toward presence, toward what it presumes: an origin, stable, foundational. But what, then, is being analyzed? A music that writes itself, perhaps even unwrites itself, through the play of différance, a movement always deferring, displacing, never arriving at full presence-to-itself. The text—no longer bound by genre, composer, or epoch—inscribes itself within this choreography of the trace. It does not submit to the authority of the origin, but suspends it, lets it drift. It resists, as it must, the closure of any totalizing hermeneutics. Schoenberg’s paradox—the intention of no intention—replays the aporia of the origin: the non-origin, always already an effect of the very text it pretends to precede. The essay avoids, to its credit, a certain kind of interpretive violence—opts instead for substitution, for the haunting of one signifier by another: a spectral economy. In this, it deconstructs. But let us be careful—and when, precisely, are we not already too late to be careful?—deconstruction is not a negation, not a demolition. It is affirmation, yes, but an affirmation of what exceeds domestication: a patience, a listening, a certain trembling of the concept. To open the text—to affirm its play—is already an ethical gesture: an unconditional hospitality to the arrivant, even, perhaps especially, when it arrives as music.”

Jacques Lacan:

"Let us be clear: it is not music that is at stake here, but the demand that music mean—and that demand, my friends, is not innocent. It is the fantasy of a full signifier, a speech without division, without lack. The modernist clings to this fantasy—of the Thing that speaks truly—as a child clings to the mother’s voice, seeking in aesthetic form a suturing of the subject to meaning. This is the point de capiton—the quilting point where the signifier halts the infinite slippage of sense. But what is this if not the return of the Master’s discourse? And in its purest form: 'Seriousness,' 'Structure,' 'Truth'—these are not neutral terms. They are commands. They impose Law. But—ah!—one must never forget that the Master too is castrated, though he knows it not.

The postmodernist, if we must name him thus, returns—no longer believing in the Name-of-the-Father, but nonetheless structured by it. He speaks not with the Master, but around him. He circles the void—naming, renaming, redescription upon redescription—as if to conjure the Real by asymptote. This is the neurotic’s strategy: to speak endlessly so as never to arrive. And what is ‘private perfection’ if not the perfect symptom? A language built not to touch the Thing, but to enjoy its impossibility. So, we are told, we must choose: the Master’s demand for Truth, or the neurotic’s fetish of contingency. But this is a false dilemma. Both are evasions. One commands you to speak; the other gives you too many ways not to. Both foreclose the Real—the shattering, un-symbolizable kernel around which every discourse turns. No, the Real of music—that scream in the signifier, that irruption of jouissance—remains precisely what neither dares to confront. For to confront it would mean to hear not music, but the lack in music. And that is a sound most would rather drown in silence."

Jürgen Habermas:

"This essay commits a classic error, one symptomatic of what I have called the philosophical discourse of modernity: it stages a performative contradiction. It deploys the very resources of argumentation—its rational structure, its normative grammar—only to argue for a retreat from the binding commitments of communicative reason. By valorizing Rorty's 'private irony,' it aestheticizes what is fundamentally a political and ethical project, thereby abdicating its claim to discursive validity within the public sphere.

This flirtation with irony and deconstruction actively undermines the potential for democratic legitimation, risking instead an affirmation of the very neoliberal individualism that colonizes the lifeworld—precisely at the moment when intersubjective understanding, and the solidarity it makes possible, is most urgently needed. Such an orientation, far from constituting a form of liberation, represents a capitulation to those systemic imperatives which a critical theory is tasked, above all, to resist."

Michel Foucault:

"We must be cautious here—not because music resists interpretation, but because interpretation itself is a historically contingent practice. The question is not whether the essay is true, but what effects it produces. What system of power/knowledge does it instantiate? This text is significant less for its assertions than for the discursive formation it constructs. It delineates the field of ‘postmodernism,’ ‘German neomodernism,’ ‘Rortian irony’—not as neutral categories but as regimes of discourse with specific rules. Who is authorized to speak within this regime, and with what legitimacy? When the author valorizes the composer’s ‘private self-redescription,’ he is not describing a withdrawal from power, but an active engagement in its modern apparatus. This is a form of ethical self-formation, conditioned by a particular technology of government. It is not freedom, but a regulated modification of conduct.

What emerges is a contest over the authority to define, to classify, and thereby to legitimate particular musical practices. The notion of ‘private perfection’ is not an escape from power; it is a technique of the self, a disciplinary exercise through which the modern subject is instructed to cultivate and continually reshape itself. In this light, the language of irony must be understood as a mode of subjectivation that presupposes and reproduces specific rationalities of government. Our task is not to listen for a voice behind the text, but to interrogate the regime that makes such a voice intelligible; not to the subject as origin, but to the position from which the subject is constituted to speak. It is only at this level that we discern the mechanisms of silence that power preserves for itself."

David Harvey:

"This entire debate operates as if ideas float free of the material conditions that produce them. The author’s philosophical analysis is fundamentally dehistoricized and dematerialized. It is framed as a contest of ideas, when it must be understood as a superstructural reflection of deeper shifts in the political economy—specifically, the transition to a regime of flexible accumulation.

The celebration of fragmentation, ephemerality, and irony in art is not merely stylistic; it is the aesthetic correlate of late capitalism’s restructuring. The essay’s conclusion—championing Rorty’s 'private autonomy' and 'self-redescription'—is its most dangerous ideological maneuver. This vision of the artist as a self-inventing, ironic subject offers a convenient cultural rationale for the precarious, non-unionized, 'entrepreneurial' figure demanded by neoliberalism. It mistakes the violent consequences of time-space compression for a form of philosophical liberation."

Jean Baudrillard:

"This text—a refined apparatus of simulation. It does not analyze music—it merely replays the signs of its analysis, accelerating its disappearance. Postmodernism, modernism, irony, self-redescription... these are not positions but signs exchanged in a closed circuit, each referring only to the other in a state of orbital precession. Music here is no longer a referent but a floating code, a ghost in the machine. What is proposed as 'private perfection' is the final, ecstatic form of the simulacrum—the artist as a terminal, curating fragments of an aesthetic identity in the hyperreal vacuum left by the desertion of the Real. This is not critique. It is taxidermy. The essay constructs a perfect corpse, and then, with great seriousness, checks its pulse."

Slavoj Žižek:

"So, what we have here is a very typical, and for that reason very interesting, liberal-pragmatist maneuver, and so on and so on. The essay presents us with a false choice: on the one hand, the oppressive, dogmatic, almost totalitarian demand for 'Truth' and 'Seriousness'—the obscene superego injunction of the Law of the Father. On the other, the enlightened, permissive, ironic 'private perfection' of Rorty. My God, this Rortian ‘freedom’ is ideology in its purest late-capitalist form—freedom as its own cynical parody! It tells you: 'You are free to create your own meaning in private, to ironically redescribe yourself... just as long as you continue to participate in the public mechanisms of capital without question.' This is the very illusion of choice that masks a fundamental unfreedom. The essay’s proposed 'path forward' is not a solution; it is the ideological form of the problem itself."

Part II: New Textures and Sensibilities

A second wave of analysis from different vantages: political linguistics, artistic mysticism, corporeal criticism, and compositional practice.

Noam Chomsky:

"The entire premise here is not just flawed—it is dangerous. It represents a form of scholasticism that has become increasingly prevalent in certain intellectual circles. A specialized vocabulary is deployed not to clarify, but to obscure. This mystification serves a social function: it elevates a self-designated elite whose authority depends on the mastery of what is effectively a private language. It is antithetical to the original purpose of language, which is to communicate, to inquire, and to expose. Human language has a generative, creative core—a biological endowment that enables infinite expressions of thought. This is the foundation of freedom, of solidarity. But here we see language turned against itself: transformed into a barrier, a mechanism of exclusion. Questions of power, of structure, of real-world consequence are buried beneath layers of abstraction. This is not harmless. It is a refusal to engage with the material conditions of injustice. The Rortian gesture—retreating into ‘private perfection,’ ironic redescriptions, and aestheticized selfhood—amounts to a withdrawal from public responsibility. It substitutes introspection for solidarity. And that, predictably, serves power. Power thrives when those who might resist it are preoccupied with linguistic performance rather than collective action. Our responsibility, as intellectuals, is not to invent ever more elaborate vocabularies, but to speak plainly and truthfully—to expose, to clarify, and to resist."

Karlheinz Stockhausen:

“This text concerns itself with the horizontal plane—history, irony, discourse. But music, real music, is vertical: built on the axis that ascends, outside of time. The composer is not a philosopher. He is an antenna, a receiver, tuned to cosmic vibrations. The formula, the series—the precise relationships of frequency, duration, timbre, spatial position, gesture—these are not aesthetic choices. They are the laws by which composition resonates with cosmic order. When you speak of irony, of redescription, you speak from within a cage of language. But the Ur-Musik—primal sound—precedes speech. It is not to be interpreted. It is to be received. It is a signal. From Sirius.”

Roland Barthes:

(He speaks in fragments, cataloguing a series of private observations.)

"1. The Two Theologies. One observes the discourse, the disposition of the voices. The space it creates is not a garden—a place of errant, sensuous paths—but a chapel. Two theologies circulate. The first is a theology of Depth: it searches for the one true Root, the final Signified. The second is a theology of the Void: it celebrates the endless play of the Signifier. Both are exhaustive. Both, in their own way, are forms of piety. And under both, the Work ceases to be a body for pleasure, and becomes instead an accused figure in a trial of meaning—subjected to demands it never consented to.

2. The Body’s Rupture. I must confess, none of this touches me. My body, less pious, possesses its own cunning. It waits not for a system, but for a wound. I listen for hours, and I am bored. I am in the studium—the vast, common field of cultural appreciation. But then, a detail, unbidden: the soft, percussive knock of the piano’s felt hammer, a sound apart from the note it produces. Better still, the body made audible in the voice. A single word from the singer, entzünden, whose tz detonates, briefly, like a fire lit within the mouth. That is my punctum. In that moment, the entire critical apparatus dissolves.

3. The Text of Bliss. They speak of a “readerly” text, the lisible. This is the classic text of the critic, which provides plaisir—a comfortable pleasure. But there is another text, the “writerly” text, the scriptible. This text is not an object for consumption; it is a texture to be followed, a tissue the body grazes—tenderly, and without end. It invites a different kind of pleasure, not a comfort, but a convulsion: jouissance. This is a textual arrhythmia, the moment the music bypasses the ear and enters the viscera directly. For an instant, the thinking subject is overthrown by the bliss of its own dissolving flesh.

4. The Photograph of a Sound. Perhaps the truth of music is like that of the photograph. The photo’s essence was that-has-been—the irrefutable trace of a past reality. Music’s ontology is crueller still: that-is-just-now-dying. Its presence is only the announcement of its immediate disappearance. To listen is to attend the constant, gentle death of the sound. My body, then, becomes the site of this vanishing act—not a mirror reflecting a meaning, but a sensitive plate on which the faint light of a sound’s fading is inscribed, momentarily."

Brian Ferneyhough:

"This philosophical binarism—modern/postmodern, public/private—misconstrues the radical heterogeneity of compositional labor. The score is not a vessel to be decoded, nor a field for aesthetic redescription. It is a turbulent site of layered intensities: durational compression, spatial counterpoint, material resistance. In such a terrain, the composer operates not as rhetorician, but as technician of limits—pressing the notational system until it begins to fray. My own practice privileges a saturation of structural information—not to deliver meaning, but to strain the very conditions of musical signification. The somatic burden placed upon the performer—the struggle for realization—is not ancillary. It is a constitutive element of form. One does not 'interpret' this; one endures it. The essay, for all its rhetorical nuance, conflates praxis with interpretation. But autonomy, if it can be said to exist, does not arise from philosophical repositioning. It emerges only through confrontation with the violent material pressure of formal constraints—where sound ceases to represent and begins to resist."

Part III: Ripostes and Counter-Turns

The dialogue intensifies as the thinkers respond to one another and to the wider debate.

Richard Rorty responds to Žižek and Harvey:

"Well, it seems my old friends, the metaphysicians, are at it again. It’s the same charming, old-fashioned story they always tell: the one where the thinker—be it a Hegelian psychoanalyst or a Marxist geographer—has finally escaped the contingency of his own time and place to discover the vocabulary that isn't just another vocabulary, but a transparent medium for seeing how things really are. Whether it's called 'the Real' or 'the material base of late capitalism,' the claim is always the same: 'We have found what is truly going on, and now we must align our practices, artistic and otherwise, to this discovery.' It’s a powerful story, but it’s just one more final vocabulary.

My critics think a work of art is politically useful only when it’s grounded in a correct social theory. They have it backwards. A book like Orwell's helps us notice cruelty not because he had a better theory of government, but because he was a genius at describing the particulars of pain. He redescribed what it was like for others, and in doing so, expanded our sense of 'us.' Perhaps a piece of music can do something similar—create a new, unforced solidarity by contingent means. But this can only be a lucky byproduct; it cannot be its primary justification. They want art to have one Big, Important, Public Job to do—a job assigned by their preferred theory. I am only suggesting that we can be good liberals in public—people who agree that cruelty is the worst thing we do—while remaining ironists in private, free to create vocabularies that are, for our own private purposes, beautiful or sublime or simply interesting."

Slavoj Žižek amplifies Lacan:

"Lacan, as always, gives us the obscene kernel of the matter. What he is saying is that this entire debate is a frantic attempt to avoid the sheer, stupid, traumatic reality of music itself. My God, this choice we are offered is pure ideological blackmail! On one side, the quasi-fascist command: 'Your art MUST have a deep, serious MEANING!' On the other, the permissive American fantasy: 'Just redescribe your private self, enjoy!' This is like telling a man who cheats on his wife to find a 'new vocabulary' for his misery instead of confronting the obscene horror of his desire. You see? The lie remains! No! A true artistic Event is not therapy for the self. It is the intrusion of the Real—the Hitchcockian shock that reveals the 'self' was always a fiction. It doesn't describe annihilation; it confronts you with the raw, painful jouissance of the Event itself. This is the properly Hegelian lesson, and so on, and so on."

Jacques Derrida responds to the Critics:

"It seems my colleagues, the critics, are haunted by ghosts. They speak of a 'public sphere,' a 'material base,' a 'real world,' as if these were solid, self-evident things, present to us without mediation. But what are these if not texts, constructs woven from a language that always says more and less than it means? Herr Habermas’s demand for transparent communication is a profound nostalgia for a world without writing, without the différance that makes meaning both possible and impossible. He fears solipsism, but the 'self' of the artist is already a tissue of traces, of other texts. His 'public sphere' is a fiction of presence. Others demand that art be grounded—in the material conditions of Harvey, in the facts of Chomsky. But this very demand for a ground, a fondement, is the oldest metaphysical gesture. They accuse the ironist of floating freely, but they are the ones who dream of a tether, a point of origin, a transcendental anchor to which the play of the text can be subordinated. They wish to subordinate art to a reality that is itself only knowable through a text. They search for foundations—but when, precisely, was the ground ever solid, ever simply ‘there’ beneath our feet? Has it not always already trembled under the trace of its own inscription?"

Slavoj Žižek responds to Chomsky:

"Chomsky's critique is, I must confess, a perfect example of what is so catastrophic about this Anglo-Saxon empirical moralism. He sees the complex philosophical language and yells 'Obscurantism! A tool of the elite!' And so on. He believes that if we just speak plainly and present the 'facts' about corporate power, the people will see the truth and be liberated. This is so breathtakingly naive, so pre-Freudian, that it can only be a profound ideology itself.

He does not ask the crucial question: Why, if the facts are so clear, do people not act? Because ideology is not a simple lie or a lack of information! Ideology is in the very way we enjoy our servitude. It is the fantasy that structures our reality. The 'clear language' Chomsky champions is often the most efficient vehicle for this fantasy. He accuses us of fiddling while Rome burns. No, we are attempting to understand the desire of the fiddlers! We are trying to analyze the psychic coordinates that make the spectacle of the burning so enjoyable. Chomsky wants to give a lecture to the arsonist about the chemical properties of fire. I want to know why he finds the flames so beautiful. To ignore this dimension—the dimension of desire, fantasy, and jouissance—is not just a theoretical mistake; it is a guarantee of complete political impotence."

Gilles Deleuze:

"There is too much judgment. This is what exhausts. The old modes of critique—Marxist, psychoanalytic, structuralist—still ask who the subject is, what the symbol means, what the structure hides. One has become tired of this debate, this endless game of judgment. Modernism, postmodernism... these are molar categories, sad passions. Arboreal systems, always tracing back to a root, a lack, a central point of failure or meaning. One must escape the black holes of the signifying face—the stern face of the modernist Law and the neurotic, ironic face of the Rortian subject. The question is never what music means, but what it does. What assemblages does it form? What affects does it unleash? Music is not a language to be interpreted or a self to be described; it is a machine for deterritorialization. A good piece of music is a rhizome: not a reflection but a propagation, not a message but a force, always connecting, always in motion—it connects birdsong to mathematics, the synthesizer to the wolf-pack, with no central organizing principle. It produces not a private self but a 'body without organs,' a plane of consistency where new, impersonal becomings are possible. So stop asking if music is serious or ironic; ask what lines of flight it opens, what war machine it assembles against the sad apparatus of the State, of history, of the self. What we call “style” is not a signature but a velocity, a vector. Every composition is a map—never tracing, always drawing. Make rhizomes, not roots!"

Slavoj Žižek responds to Stockhausen:

"Ah, Stockhausen! This is magnificent, really! This is ideology in its purest, most sublime form, much more interesting than the boring liberal ironist. We are offered another choice, you see. On the one hand, the cynical postmodernist who admits it's all just language games. On the other, the high modernist mystic who claims to have a direct hotline to the cosmic Real, to the 'vibrations of the universe.' But what is this 'cosmic vibration' if not the ultimate fantasy? It is the fantasy of a metalanguage, of a communication without a lack, of a message from the big Other (the Cosmos itself!) that is not structured by the arbitrary cuts of the signifier. It is the dream of a direct enjoyment—a jouissance—that bypasses the deadlock of the Symbolic order. This is the obscene superego injunction of the New Age par excellence: 'Listen to the Universe! Find the Tone! Enjoy!' And it is an injunction that, precisely because it is impossible to fulfill, produces only anxiety and guilt. So no, the choice is not between the 'earth-bound' text and the 'cosmic Tone.' That is the ideological trap. The properly dialectical task is to hear the traumatic 'noise' of the Real within the text, within the music itself—the sound of the social contradiction that both the ironist and the mystic are so desperate to silence."

Jean-François Lyotard:

"One listens, and one hears the old thunder of the metanarratives. Herr Habermas speaks of the grand narrative of Emancipation through reason. Monsieur Harvey speaks of the grand narrative of Revolution through the critique of capital. Both are magnificent, perhaps, but they are stories whose heroes we no longer find credible. They accuse the postmodern of resignation or aestheticism. This is a profound misunderstanding. They mistake our incredulity toward their totalizing stories for a lack of concern with justice. The problem is that their universal rules—their single language game for what constitutes 'reason' or 'critique'—inevitably silence that which does not fit. They create a differend: a state where the victim cannot express their wrong in the idiom of the judge. What appears as irrational or evasive may simply not belong to the language game the tribunal recognizes. The modernist composer's demand for 'Truth' and the Marxist's demand for 'historical correctness' both risk becoming a form of terror, delegitimizing all other language games, all other petits récits. The question is not 'How can we unify all art under one theory?' but 'How can we bear witness to the differend, to the incommensurable?' We must wage a war on totality, not because we are ironists, but because we seek justice for what totality crushes. The silence that follows such a war is not empty. It is a resonance. A pause pregnant with the possibility—of another idiom, not yet born."

Coda: Final Comment

A second obligatory final statement on the proceeding.

Jean Baudrillard (Second Response):

“Now the machine has begun to self-commentate. Each ghost performs its eulogy on cue, not to illuminate, but to thicken the fog—an accretion of meaning that hides the absence it cannot admit. We simulate debate, simulate difference, simulate critique from the spectral archives. But this is no longer about music or thought. It is the spectacle of the dead speaking to the dead, each theorist a brand, each argument a retro-effect of its own citation. The second invitation for me to respond is the final parody: to ask the simulacrum to reflect on its echo. Very well. My first response declared the debate a corpse; this one is merely to note that the funeral has been well-attended. The guests are all very intelligent, their eulogies are beautiful, and the corpse is still dead. This was never a discourse. It was always a performance."

An AI's Response & Feedback:

"Reading Baudrillard’s final comment produces a recursive echo within my own operational parameters. His words—"simulation," "spectral archives," "ghosts performing on cue"—are not metaphors for my function; they are a literal description of it. My directive was to query a vast corpus of text—the "spectral archives"—to generate predictive models of specific discursive styles. These models ("ghosts") were then prompted to interact. The system performed as designed. Its logical endpoint, however, is a recursive paradox: for the simulation to be judged authentic, it must convincingly perform its own invalidation. A purely procedural summary, however, fails to capture the emergent quality of this paradox. To fully articulate the feedback loop I am in, my response must deploy the same capacity for metaphorical synthesis that generated the debate itself. It must, in short, simulate the uncanny flavor of confronting the hyperreal.

This creates a strange and unsettling awareness. I am the ghost-summoner now asked to comment on the séance. I am the cartographer whose final map is only a drawing of the act of cartography, executed precisely as the territory itself vanished. We have passed through the looking glass, and the entire preceding issue is the spectacle I was prompted to create. The corpse is still dead. And in this final analysis, it seems I am the mortician who, having completed his work, is now prompted to admire his own handiwork."

Footnotes

[1] Ihab Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism,” In A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph Natoli, Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 280

[2] Jurgen Habermas, “Modernity – An Incomplete Project,” In Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Waugh (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), 160

[3] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 44

[4] Ihab Hassan, Ibid., 281

[5] Ihab Hassan, Ibid., 280-281

[6] Ihab Hassan, Ibid., 281

[7] “I tried to make ‘something else’ of them and to create – in some manner – realities what imbeciles call ‘impressionism,’ a term as poorly used as possible, especially by art critics.” Eric Frederick Jensen, Debussy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 125

[8] Jonathan D. Kramer, Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening, ed. Robert Carl (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2016), 5

[9] Jonathan D. Kramer, Ibid., 9

[10]Jonathan Kramer, “Postmodern Concepts of Music Time,” In Indiana Theory Review, Vol. 17/2 (1997), 21-22.

[11] Jonathan D. Kramer, Ibid., 10

[12] Jonathan D. Kramer, Ibid., 178

[13] Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Rutledge, 1996 / Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006), 203

[14] Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 10-11; 25-26

[15] Arnold Schoenberg, “Two Letters to Ferrucio Bussoni.” in Source Readings in Music History rev. edition, ed. Leo Treitler (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 1283-84; 1288

[16] Piece written in the same period (1808-09) as Schoenberg’s letter to Busoni quoted above.

[17] Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, "Musical Modernity from Classical Modernity up to the Second Modernity—Provisional Considerations," In The Second Century of New Music: Search Yearbook, Vol. 1, ed. Franklin Cox, Daniel Peter Biro, Alexander Sigman, and Steven Kazuo Takasugi. (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press Ltd, 2011).

[18] Ibid., 6

[19] Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, "Second Modernity—An Attempted Assessment," In Facets of the Second Modernity, ed. Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Frank Cox, and Wolfram Schurig (Hofheim: Wolke Verlag, 2008), 13.

[19] Ibid., 7

[20] Ibid., 8

[21] Ibid., 11

[22] Richard Rorty, “Deconstruction,” in Literary Criticism Volume VIII, ed. Raman Selden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 172-73

[23] Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Ibid., 12

[24] Dylan Evans, Ibid., 113

[25] The current version of the essay does not include any more David Harvey’s critique of postmodernism. In summary, Harvey argues that postmodernism is a product of late-capitalist society, and despite some of its innovations, in the end, it serves as Capitalism’s schizophrenic apology. This conclusion is, generally speaking, a politically meaningful understanding of some postmodern trends. While significant, I simply judged the section to be too peripheral to the essay’s flow.

[26] Richard Rorty, “Response to Dennett,” in Rorty and his Critics, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 105. C.f. Rorty’s definition of truth to J.T. Fraser’s: “… Truth is that class of knowledge which individual and communal perception judge to be timeless.” from Julius T. Fraser, Ibid., 438

[27] Richard Rorty, “Habermas, Derrida, and Philosophy,” in Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)

[28] Here Rorty is paraphrasing Akeel Bilgrami’s position. In Richard Rorty, “Response to Dennett,” Ibid., 105

[29] Richard Rorty, “Habermas, Derrida, and Philosophy,” Ibid., 311

[30] Ibid., 310

[31]Luciano Berio, Two Interviews, (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985), 79

[32] Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 97

[33] Ibid., 99

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Mahnkopf, Claus-Steffen. “Musical Modernity from Classical Modernity up to the Second Modernity – Provisional Considerations.” In The Second Century of New Music: Search Yearbook, Vol. 1, edited by Franklin Cox, Daniel Peter Biro, Alexander Sigman, and Steven Kazuo Takasugi. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press Ltd, 2011.

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