some attempt to reestablish a "true" or "point by point" representation of some
externally existing reality--no map ever is, and the postmodern global situation is
unrepresentable in such form in any event--but rather, an aesthetic as well as the-
oretical attempt "to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects
and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our
spatial as well as our social confusion. Jameson, of course, believes that seeing
postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism" clears the way for an "as
yet unimaginable new mode of representing" this global postmodern condition.

While poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches tended to dominate de-
bates about cultural criticism through the 1970s and most of the 1980s and are
still influential in certain circles, there were signs, beginning in the mid-1980s,
that their heyday had begun to wane. In the case of each of the "metaphysical uni-
ties" that poststructuralism had attempted to decenter--subject, text, and his-
tory--efforts have appeared to reconstruct them in ways that, while remaining
sensitive to poststructuralist critiques, permit new ways of theorizing contempo-
rary culture and actively intervening in it. Such figures as Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari perhaps paved the way already in the 1970s in France by decisively reject-
ing the pantextualism characteristic of structuralism and poststructuralism. In
such works as Anti-Oedipus ( 1972), they insisted on the interplay of Freudian de-
sire and Marxian production, neither representable in purely textual terms, as the
ultimate basis for any critique of contemporary society. By the mid-1980s, a
younger and decidedly more liberal and humanistic generation, sometimes called
the "New Philosophers," had arisen in France and had begun to attack the radical
posturings of both the poststructuralists and the Marxist tradition stemming
from Althusser.

Typical of these new attitudes was French Philosophy of the Sixties. An Essay on
Antihumanism ( 1985), by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut. Relating the "radical
French philosophy of the '60s" to the emergence and subsequent failure of the
student uprisings of 1968, the work was a scathing critique of the poststructural-
ists' fascination bordering on obsession with Nietzschean irrationalism and (es-
pecially) its extreme mystification in Heidegger, and of certain neo-Marxists with
a deterministic and essentially Leninist version of Marx. Pointing to the explicit
embrace of an antihumanist stance in both cases, Ferry and Renaut sought a crit-
ically chastened return to the subject, one at least adequate to preserving and jus-
tifying the democratic and humanistic ideals of the original modern project of
the Enlightenment.

Likewise, the radically decentered text of poststructuralism has come under fire
from a number of different directions. While few have attempted to reinstate the
text as some "transcendent metaphysical unity of meaning," a number of critics
have called attention to certain determinate ways in which texts achieve partial

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