The “Two Cultures” Revisited

POSTMODERNISM MIGHT BE DEFINED AS AN INABILITY TO NEGOTIATE the myriad levels of abstraction at play in the aestheticized reality of contemporary life. This epistemological crisis is perhaps nowhere seen more clearly than in the antagonism between literary intellectuals and pioneers of new electronic media-between the culture of the text and the culture of the image, whose modes of knowledge are often taken to be mutually exclusive. If we are ever to make sense of the problems posed by the new media and the opportunities these offer, we must begin to rethink our longstanding equation of meaning with the logic and syntactical structures of language and reevaluate our other ways of knowing the world.