ABSTRACT
It may well be that I will not honour my topic. This will depend upon your point of view. In earlier times, I might have presumed upon its direction. Today, however, Marxists are less sure of themselves and postmodernists would be offended by any other certainty than uncertainty. Here is a dilemma we have inherited from modernism, namely, that we cannot start from any certain sense of the public's authority nor of its morality. This is so because a modern audience cannot resist the seduction of its own decentering, of its irrelevance and its dispersion. So you would be no more satisfied if I were to presume upon your postmodernism as a perspective upon your Marxism than if I were to treat your Marxism as an antidote for your postmodernism. So I will not relate to you what you already know about these elements of our culture. Rather, I will try to keep the reflections that follow within and against the tradition of modernity, weighing its hopes while marking its melancholy. This, then, is an attempt to honor the question of their relationship by avoiding any dogmatic account of either postmodernism or of Marxism while nevertheless striving within the limits of each discipline to put oneself in question.
