The best protection against this kind of critique, and the best way of signalling that one was up to date enough to be aware of it, whether in doing philosophy, making theory, or creating art, was to become very self-conscious indeed concerning one’s own position, and to build in the appropriate qualifications about it. This self-conscious reflexivity, whose symptom was a frequent recourse to metalanguages, was seen by some as the hallmark of philosophy under postmodern conditions.
