ABSTRACT
The previous three chapters have been reviewing efforts at sabotage, attempts to derail the intellectual project of attaining a definitive comprehension of reality in all its dimensions, natural and social, that has provided the structure for intellectual life in the West for three hundred years and more (as well as the rationale for the worldwide hegemony that this intellectual tradition has had with respect to the definition of knowledge). Key to the sabotage has been the purported revelation that the intellectual project was and is part of a wider political project, and one very different from that with which it might have imagined itself associated. The political project has achieved the overwhelming rationalisation of modern societies, but it does not coincide with the dissemination of sovereign individual reason, a mistake which intellectuals have often made. The centralised, disciplined structures of modern society, as most graphically embodied in indus-trial mass production, have been disintegrating as the nature of the Western societies shifts toward the decentralised and fluid forms of a ‘consumer society’. As a result, the structures of ‘modern’ thought too have folded in upon themselves. Intellectual resistance to dominant arrangements is no longer conceivable as an association between an intellectual vanguard and a potentially revolutionary mass.
