and in a media-suffused society, very little remains that can be considered 'irrational' in the older sense of 'incomprehensible': the vilest forms of human decision-making and behaviour -- torture by sadists and overt or covert foreign intervention by government leaders -- are now for all of us comprehensible (in terms of a Diltheyan Verstehen, say), whatever we think of them. Whether such an enormously expanded concept of Reason then has any further normative value (as Habermas still thinks) in a situation in which its opposite, the irrational, has shrunk to virtual non-existence, is another, and an interesting, question. But Becker's calculations (and the word does not at all in him imply Homo economicus, but rather very much unreflective, everyday, 'preconscious' behaviour of all kinds) belong in that mainstream; indeed, the system makes me think more than anything else of Sartrean freedom in so far as it implies a responsibility for everything we do -- Sartrean choice (which, of course, in the same way takes place on a non-self-conscious everyday behavioural level) means the individual or collective production at every moment of Becker's 'commodities' (which need not be hedonistic in any narrow sense, altruism being, for example, just such a commodity or pleasure). The representational consequences of a view like this will now lead us belatedly to pronounce the word postmodernism for the first time. Only Sartre's novels, indeed (and they are samples; enormous, unfinished fragments), give any sense of what a representation of life that interpreted and narrated every human act and gesture, desire and decision, in terms of Becker's maximization model would look like. Such representation would reveal a world peculiarly without transcendence and without perspective (death is here, for example, just another matter of utility maximization), and indeed without plot in any traditional sense, since all choices would be equidistant and on the same level. The analogy with Sartre, however, suggests that this kind of reading -- which ought to be very much a demystifying eyeball-to-eyeball encounter with daily life, with no distance and no embellishments -- might not be altogether postmodern in the more fantastic senses of that aesthetic. Becker seems to have missed the wilder forms of consumption available in the postmodern, which is elsewhere capable of staging a virtual delirium of the consumption of the very idea of consumption: in the postmodern, indeed, it is the very idea of the market that is consumed with the most prodigious gratification; as it were, a bonus or surplus of the commodification process. Becker's sober calculations fall far short of that, not necessarily because postmodernism is inconsistent or incompatible with political conservatism but, rather, primarily because his is finally a production and not a consumption model at all, as has been suggested above. Shades of the great introduction to the Grundrisse, in

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