SOURCE: “The Postmodern Museum,” in Philosophical Events: Essays of the '80s, Columbia University Press, 1991, pp. 105-17.

In the following essay, originally published in 1985, Rajchman describes Les Immatériaux, and discusses the nature of postmodernism and its relation to language, technoscience and modernism.

Les Immatériaux (March 28-July 25, 1985) was the most expensive exhibition in the Beaubourg museum to date. A collective effort of more than fifty people working over two years under the auspices of the Centre de Création Industrielle, it was directed by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard and company transformed the fifth floor of the museum into a gigantic metallic maze, divided by gray gauze screens into sixty-one “sites”; these sites were arranged consecutively along five adjacent pathways. For the most part the sites consisted of small installations of various cultural artifacts; technological representations and electronic devices, and were titled by the ideas...