Post-Modern FAQ
Jim Barcelona
Is there a post-modern FAQ? If so, would you please post it to this news
group?
Since the FAQ is post-modern, I'm assuming that it'll have questions that
are answered by questions, right?
Cheers,
Jim
Lee Goddard Collective
On Thu, 5 Feb 1998 23:43:58 -0800 "Jim Barcelona" <ba...@slip.net> posted
article <6befj4$lgd$1...@owl.slip.net> to alt.postmodern:
Uf only, James, if only. Attached is a nearly complete version of Van Piercy's
faq, to be found in its entirity via your favorite and mine, www.dejanews.com.
Hello,
Lee
----------------------------->
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From: vpi...@indiana.edu (Van Piercy)
Newsgroups: news.answers,alt.postmodern,alt.answers
Subject: Alt.Postmodern FAQ
Followup-To: poster
Date: 22 Oct 1996 17:23:57 GMT
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington
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Summary: FAQ for alt.postmodern
Keywords: postmodern, pomo, modernism, postmodernity, culture
Archive-name: postmodern-faq
Posting-Frequency: monthly
Last-modified: 1996/6/28
Version: 1.05
Originator: vpi...@ezinfo.ucs.indiana.edu
Xref: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu news.answers:85035 alt.postmodern:47222
alt.answers:21365
{1.0}
Permission to copy and share this file without monetary profit is
granted provided this statement and the author's name appear in the
file. NONE OF THE PUBLISHED SOURCES QUOTED HERE UNDER FAIR USE HAVE
GIVEN THEIR WRITTEN PERMISSION TO BE QUOTED IN A FAQ FILE APPEARING ON
THE NET. Please distribute this file with due recognition
of copyright laws and original authors' and publishers' rights and
credits. The purpose of this file is purely educational.
Van Piercy
English Dept., Indiana University
Copyr. 1996. An alt.postmodern FAQ file, Version 1.05
-------------------------------
===============================
Other places to find this file:
Anonymous ftp and web sites:
ftp.seas.gwu.edu/pub/rtfm/alt/postmodern/An_Alt.Postmodern_FAQ
http://helios.augustana-edu/%7Egmb/postmodern/faq1.html
-------------------------------
===============================
{1.01}
LATEST VERSION CHANGES
In versions 1.01 through 1.05 most of the changes are cosmetic. Typos
have been corrected, elements of format have been made more consistent,
the digest streamlined and supplemented, and a few additions made to the
bibliography sections. Any corrections, errors, bad links, etc., should
be made known to VPI...@INDIANA.EDU.
{1.02}
FUTURE INTENDED CHANGES
Some suggestions for changes to this FAQ include: expanding the digest
section to include different threads and voices on the group; a resource
guide for items on the internet that discuss the postmodern; and more
bibliographic sections and short introductory essays on topics closely
associated with ideas about the postmodern, e.g., semiotics,
architecture, fiction, fine arts, etc.
My gratitude to everyone who has been in e-mail contact with me
discussing this FAQ, its plusses and minuses. If you'd like to author a
section in this FAQ or have ideas about it contact VPI...@INDIANA.EDU.
WHAT THIS FILE CONTAINS:
*****
1.0 Statement of limited copyright and notice of fair use.
1.01 Latest version changes.
1.02 Future intended changes to this FAQ.
1.1 A discussion of what this FAQ is trying to do and its philosophy for
doing it.
2.0 How to find out more about what "postmodern" means.
2.1 Two basic issues central to many discussions of the postmodern.
2.2 A very short bibliographic essay on Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida and
Deleuze.
3.0 Three reference work definitions of the postmodern.
4.0 Twenty statements about postmodernism by published authors.
5.0 A short bibliography and note on other bibliographies.
5.1 Some principal or primary sources.
5.2 General works, anthologies, and secondary sources.
5.3 A list of works on modernity, modernism and the avant-garde.
5.4 A minimal list of writings on postmodernism and its relation to
religion, Japan and cyberpunk.
6.0 A digest of an alt.postmodern newsgroup thread on aestheticism,
fascism, futurism, Benjamin, and landscape design.
6.1 Final word.
*****
{1.1}
This is a "FAQ" (Frequently Asked Questions) file that has few of
the questions in it but tries to enlist many of the various answers.
It is not exhaustive.
A number of users cruising this newsgroup before have asked for a
FAQ file, and while this particular FAQ file cannot hope to be
definitive, it does try to meet that basic, initial need for information
to the most common questions, "What is postmodernism?" "How do I find
out more about it?"
This FAQ should be of use for research into the question of the
postmodern, and I hope that even experienced students of postmodernism
will find it a serviceable source of reference. I have tried to include
detailed and accurate information on the bibliographic entries.
This file is not meant to be monolithically definitive or singularly
authoritative, nor is it meant to supplant the knowledge or opinions
of others on this group, many of whom might have serious questions or
reservations about elements or assumptions of this file. This FAQ is
only one person's take on a very broad and evolving field of cultural
dispute, and is offered in a spirit of collegiality and general
education.
This FAQ can be read at least on three distinct levels each
corresponding to one of its major sections: 1) as a relatively quick
overview of the term "postmodern" as it is found in some standard
reference works; 2) as a bibliography and research aid for the student
of postmodernism, and 3) as an examination of what published and
varyingly "recognized" authorities have to say about the subject in
their own words. Reading these crystallized statements of what
postmodernism is taken to be by accomplished writers in the field should
introduce a sense of the thematics and semantics, the "language games"
and politics, at play in even attempting to define what the postmodern
is. For my part, in organizing and selecting the quotations I have
tried to present conservative positions, traditionalist, humanist and
reactionary positions, as well as Nietzschean, progressive, socialist,
feminist and Marxian and neo-Marxian positions on the postmodern. To my
mind, it is easier for a document of this type to err on the side of
exclusivity and ideological purity than it is to err on the side of
pluralism and report of the variety of serious opinion on the topic.
Ideally, there will be future additions to this file, and perhaps
even other FAQ files will be made that compete with this file and
construct the field in different ways. Imagine a newsgroup with four or
five different, partly overlapping, lengthy FAQ files all ostensibly
covering the same topic (and not just well established or recognized
sub-topics or specialist fields)! I submit that that is a reasonable
possibility in an alt.postmodern newsgroup.
{2.0}
HOW DO I FIND OUT MORE ABOUT POSTMODERNISM?
(Or, "What should I know about this stuff?")
Either of these is a daunting question. My answer would
be for you to read this FAQ file, read some of the books listed in this
FAQ file, follow the exchanges on this newsgroup, put questions to the
newsgroup's posters, and, as a productive exercise, find out what
modernism is or is supposed to have been, and what values and
assumptions it championed. To that end, I've included a bibliographic
section on modernity and the avant-garde to offer some assistance. Some
especially serious critics of postmodern thought can be found there
(Habermas, Giddens, Taylor, Williams). These writers in particular
insist on the complex and on-going nature of the modernist enterprise
and reject the notion that postmodernism represents any sustained and
substantial break from it. Readers can further enact for themselves a
similar political and ideological confrontation that can be said to have
occurred in the American context between modernist and postmodernist in
the conjuncture between Lionel Trilling's _The Liberal Imagination_
(Viking 1950) and Susan Sontag's _Against Interpretation_ (Laurel 1969).
{2.1}
The opportunity to generate polemic in any discussion of the
postmodern is prodigious. Keeping an eye on the two following basic
issues can often help orient one to the various politics and agendas
that tend to cloud or obscure different discussions of the postmodern.
One is the problem of critical distance and the other is a problem of
nomenclature.
1) What is the author's take on the idea that critical distance and
the potential for real objectivity are unattainable? This question can
be seen at work in both Haraway's comments (see below) about what she
sees as Jameson's main thesis on postmodernism, and in Laclau's mapping
of an "analytic terrain" where the "given" is no longer a viable myth.
Pejoratively put, this collapse of critical distance is decried as
"aestheticist" or as aestheticizing ideology in many discussions
(Norris). The usual implication is that the culprits are decadent,
apolitical and dangerously irrational. The historical antecedents
referred to are often Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde's "dandyism" and the
"Art for Art's sake" movement. Whereas for many differently oriented
commentators those same decriers of aestheticism are often themselves
denounced as totalitarian rationalists, modernists, "mere" moralizers,
reactionaries and unsophisticated know-nothings (Haraway; Giroux).
2) The terms postmodern, postmodernity and postmodernism can be seen
to associate or conjure different meanings: the term postmodern is
inclusively ambiguous of what people mean when they talk about issues
that come up in discussions of postmodernity and postmodernism.
Postmodernity is a sign for contemporary society, for the stage of
technological and economic organization which our society has reached.
Postmodernism then can be, as Eco says, a "spiritual" category rather
than a discrete period in history; a "style" in the arts and in culture
indebted to ironic and parodic pastiche as well as to a sense of history
now seen less as a story of lineal progression and triumph than as a
story of recurring cycles.
Analogously, and only for purposes of illustration, the condition
of modernity is often spoken of as the rapid pace and texture of life
in a society experienced as the result of the industrial revolution
(Berman). However, modern_ism_ is a movement in culture and the arts
usually identified as a period and style beginning with impressionism as
a break with Realism in the fine arts and in literature. Prior to
modernism one finds periods and styles associated with other distinct
aesthetic movements, e.g., Romanticism and Realism. For instance, both
Blake and Balzac, Romantic and Realist representatives respectively,
could be said to have had some experience of modernity, to have lived
during the early stages of the expansion of bourgeois or industrial
capitalism and technology and science, whereas no one thinks of their
respective arts or modes of expression as obviously "modernist."
{2.2}
Finally, I must emphasize that certain influential figures who
converge in discussions of the postmodern, themselves rarely use the word
"postmodern" and do not describe their theories or discourses in that way.
Their theories can't be simply reduced to "postmodernism" without
controversy, and yet their arguments are drawn on and criticized very
often in the name of what goes by the "postmodern." The works of Friedrich
Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze are
prevalent in discussions on the postmodern (and this insistent close
association probably explains the oft-remarked failure to distinguish
between post-structuralism and post- modernism).
I'd suggest that it is important for following discussions of
postmodern theory to study and know Nietzsche's philosophy and espe-
cially his short essay on history, _On the Advantage and Disadvantage
of History for Life_ (transl. Peter Preuss. Indianapolis: Hackett,
1980). An acquaintance with the writings of Foucault, Derrida and
Deleuze can be useful. They have all been profound students or readers
of Nietzsche, part of a "return to Nietzsche" or the "New Nietzsche"
movement in France in the 1960s. There's a nice collection of
Foucault's writings edited by Paul Rabinow titled _The Foucault Reader_
published by Pantheon Books, 1984. For Derrida, to pick a citation for
him almost at random, see the essay "Differance" in _Margins of
Philosophy_ (transl. Alan Bass. Chicago UP, 1982). On Deleuze, the best
way into his ideas is to dive into one of his texts and keep going. The
most rewarding introduction to his work that I've seen is by Brian
Massumi, who translated _Milles Plateaux_, titled _A User's Guide to
Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari_
(MIT Press, 1992). By no means is this group of suggested readings
intended to be limiting or exhaustive. I am only pointing out what seem
particularly plausible or telling routes of entry into these writers'
ideas.
{3.0}
WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?
Here are three published definitions from "standard" reference
works (cross-references are cited below in the FAQ bibliography section):
(A) "Post-modernism[:] The break away from 19th-century values is often
classified as modernism and carries the connotations of transgression
and rebellion. However, the last twenty years has seen a change in this
attitude towards focussing upon a series of unresolvable philosophical
and social debates, such as race, gender and class. Rather than
challenging and destroying cultural definitions, as does modernism,
post-modernism resists the very idea of boundaries. It regards
distinctions as undesirable and even impossible, so that an almost
Utopian world, free from all constraints, becomes possible.
"It must be realized though, that post-modernism has many
interpretations and that no single definition is adequate. Different
disciplines have participated in the post-modernist movement in
varying ways, for example, in architecture traditional limits have
become indistinguishable, so that what is commonly on the outside of a
building is placed within, and vice versa. In literature, writers adopt
a self-conscious intertextuality sometimes verging on pastiche, which
denies the formal propriety of authorship and genre. In commercial
terms post-modernism may be seen as part of the growth of consumer
capitalism into multinational and technological identity.
"Its all-embracing nature thus makes post-modernism as relevant to
street events as to the *avant garde*, and as such is one of the major
focal points in the emergence of interdisciplinary and cultural
studies." (THE PRENTICE HALL GUIDE TO ENGLISH LITERATURE, Ed.
Marion Wynne-Davies. First Prentice Hall edition, copyright 1990 by
Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd. 812-13)
(B) "Postmodernism and postmodernity[,] a cultural and ideological
configuration variously defined, with different aspects of the general
phenomenon emphasized by different theorists, postmodernity is seen as
involving an end of the dominance of an overarching belief in scientific
rationality and a unitary theory of PROGRESS, the replacement of
empiricist theories of representation and TRUTH, and increased
emphasis on the importance of the unconscious, on free-floating signs
and images, and a plurality of viewpoints. Associated also with the
idea of a postindustrial age (compare POSTINDUSTRIAL SOCIETY [Daniel
Bell]), theorists such as BAUDRILLARD (1983) and Lyotard (1984) make
central to postmodernity a shift from a `productive' to a `reproductive'
social order, in which simulations and models--and more generally,
signs--increasingly constitute the world, so that any distinction
between the appearance and the `real' is lost. Lyotard, for example,
speaks especially of the replacement of any *grand narrative* [les
grands recits] by more local `accounts' of reality as distinctive of
postmodernism and postmodernity. Baudrillard talks of the `triumph of
signifying culture.' Capturing the new orientation characteristic of
postmodernism, compared with portrayals of modernity as an era or a
definite period, the advent of postmodernity is often presented as a
`mood' or `state of mind' (see Featherstone, 1988). If modernism as a
movement in literature and the arts is also distinguished by its
rejection of an emphasis on representation, postmodernism carries this
movement a stage further. Another feature of postmodernism seen by
some theorists is that the boundaries between `high' and `low' culture
tend to be broken down, for example, motion pictures, jazz, and rock
music (see Lash, 1990). According to many theorists, postmodernist
cultural movements, which often overlap with new political tendencies
and social movements in contemporary society, are particularly
associated with the increasing importance of new class fractions, for
example, `expressive professions' within the service class (see Lash and
Urry, 1987)." (David Jary and Julia Jary. eds. THE HARPER COLLINS
DICTIONARY OF SOCIOLOGY. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 375-6)
(C) "Postmodernism[:] A portmanteau term encompassing a variety of
developments in intellectual culture, the arts and the fashion industry
in the 1970s and 1980s. Among the characteristic gestures of
postmodernist thinking is a refusal of the `totalizing' or
`essentialist' tendencies of earlier theoretical systems, especially
classic Marxism, with their claims to referential truth, scientificity,
and belief in progress. Postmodernism, on the contrary, is committed to
modes of thinking and representation which emphasize fragmentations,
discontinuities and incommensurable aspects of a given object, from
intellectual systems to architecture.
"Postmodernist analysis is often marked by forms of writing that are
more literary, certainly more self-reflexive, than is common in critical
writing - the critic as self-conscious creator of new meanings upon the
ground of the object of study, showing that object no special respect.
It prefers montage to perspective, intertextuality to referentiality,
`bits-as-bits' to unified totalities. It delights in excess, play,
carnival, asymmetry, even mess, and in the emancipation of meanings
>from their bondage to mere lumpenreality.
Theorists of postmodernism include Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, Fredric Jameson, Paul Virilio, Dick Hebdige,
Jean-Francois Lyotard, among others; a list whose maleness has not
gone unnoticed (see Propyn 1987), but which may immediately be countered
by reading the exemplary essay by Meaghan Morris (1988) which moves
easily among postmodernism's sense of multiple mobilities, bodily,
temporal and textual, without ever claiming postmodernist status for
itself." (Tim O'Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin
Montgomery and John Fisk. eds. KEY CONCEPTS IN COMMUNICATION AND
CULTURAL STUDIES. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1994. 234-4)
{4.0} PASSAGES FROM FREQUENTLY (and not so frequently) CITED COM-
MENTATORS AND POSTMODERNIST THEORY THEORISTS (Or, a slide-show of twenty
statements on the postmodern)
**
(1) "The case for its [postmodernism's] existence depends on the
hypothesis of some radical break or *coupure*, generally traced
back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s.
"As the word itself suggests, this break is most often related
to notions of the waning or extinction of the hundred-year-old
modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic repudiation).
Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism in
philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the
films of the great *auteurs*, or the modernist school of poetry
(as institutionalized and canonized in the works of Wallace
Stevens) all are now seen as the final, extraordinary flowering
of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with
them. The enumeration of what follows, then, at once becomes
empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art,
but also photorealism, and beyond it, the `new expressionism'; the
moment, in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classi-
cal and `popular' styles found in composers like Phil Glass and
Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave rock (the Beatles and the
Stones now standing as the high-modernist moment of that more
recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard, post-
Godard, and experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new
type of commercial film...; Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed,
on the one hand, and the French *nouveau roman* and its succes-
sion, on the other, along with alarming new kinds of literary
criticism based on some new aesthetic of textuality or *ecri-
ture*... The list might be extended indefinitely; but does it
imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic
style and fashion changes determined by an older high-modernist
imperative of stylistic innovation?" (Jameson 1-2)
**
(2) "For many theorists occupying various positions on the
political spectrum, the current historical moment signals less a
need to come to grips with the new forms of knowledge, experi-
ences, and conditions that constitute postmodernism than the
necessity to write its obituary. The signs of exhaustion are in
part measured by the fact that postmodernism has gripped two gen-
erations of intellectuals who have pondered endlessly over its
meaning and implications as a `social condition and cultural
movement' (Jencks 10). The `postmodern debate' has spurned little
consensus and a great deal of confusion and animosity. The themes
are, by now, well known: master narratives and traditions of
knowledge grounded in first principles are spurned; philosophical
principles of canonicity and the notion of the sacred have become
suspect; epistemic certainty and the fixed boundaries of
academic knowledge have been challenged by a `war on totality'
and a disavowal of all-encompassing, single, world-views; rigid
distinctions between high and low culture have been rejected by
insistence that the products of the so-called mass culture, popu-
lar, and folk art forms are proper objects of study; the
Enlightenment correspondence between history and progress and the
modernist faith in rationality, science, and freedom have
incurred a deep-rooted skepticism; the fixed and unified identity
of the humanist subject has been replaced by a call for narrative
space that is pluralized and fluid; and, finally, though far from
complete, history is spurned as a unilinear process that moves
the West progressively toward a final realization of freedom.
While these and other issues have become central to the post-
modern debate, they are connected through the challenges and
provocations they provide to modernity's conception of history,
agency, representation, culture, and the responsibility of
intellectuals. The postmodern challenge constitutes not only a
diverse body of cultural criticism, it must also be seen as a
contextual discourse that has challenged specific disciplinary
boundaries in such fields as literary studies, geography, educa-
tion, architecture, feminism, performance art, anthropology,
sociology, and many other areas. Given its broad theoretical
reach, its political anarchism, and its challenge to `legislat-
ing' intellectuals, it is not surprising that there has been a
growing movement on the part of diverse critics to distance them-
selves from postmodernism." (Giroux 1-2)
**
(3) "A provocative, comprehensive argument about the politics and
theories of `postmodernism' is made by Fredric Jameson (1984),
who argues that postmodernism is not an option, a style among
others, but a cultural dominant requiring radical reinvention of
left politics from within; there is no longer any place from
without that gives meaning to the comforting fiction of critical
distance. Jameson also makes clear why one cannot be for or
against postmodernism, an essentially moralist move. My position
is that feminists (and others) need continuous cultural reinven-
tion, postmodernist critique, and historical materialsm; only a
cyborg would have a chance. The old dominations of white capi-
talist patriarchy seem nostalgically innocent now: they normal-
ized heterogeneity, into man and woman, white and black, for
example. `Advanced capitalism' and postmodernism release
heterogeneity without a norm, and we are flattened, without sub-
jectivity, which requires depth, even unfriendly and drowning
depths." (Donna Haraway. _Simians, Cyborgs, and Women_. New York:
Routledge, 1991. 244-5, n4.)
**
(4) "The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained
the *total occupation* of social life. Not only is the relation
to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one
sees is its world. Modern economic production extends the dic-
tatorship extensively and intensively. In the least industri-
alized places, its reign is already attested by a few star com-
modities and by the imperialist domination imposed by regions
which are ahead in the development of productivity. In the
advanced regions, social space is invaded by a continuous super-
imposition of geological layers of commodities. At this point in
the `second industrial revolution,' alienated consumption becomes
for the masses a duty supplementary to alienated production. It
is *all the sold labor* of a society which globally becomes the
*total commodity* for which the cycle must be continued. For
this to be done, the total commodity has to return as a fragment
to the fragmented individual, absolutely separated from the pro-
ductive forces operating as a whole. Thus it is here that the
specialized science of domination must in turn specialize: it
fragments itself into sociology, psycho-technics, cybernetics,
semiology, etc., watching over the self-regulation of every level
of the process." (Debord 1977, paragraph 42)
**
(5) "The frenzied expansion of the mass media [is a mark of our
postmodernity and] has political consequences which are not so
wholly negative. This becomes most apparent when we look at rep-
resentations of the Third World. No longer can this be confined
to the realist documentary, or the exotic televisual voyage. The
Third World refuses now, to `us,' in the West, to be reassuringly
out of sight. It is as adept at using the global media as the
old colonialist powers." (Angela McRobbie, "Postmodernism and
Popular Culture," in _Postmodernism: ICA documents_. Ed. Lisa
Appignanesi. London: FAB, 1989. 169.)
**
(6) "Postmodernism questions the efficacy of strategies of trans-
formation associated with autonomy, declaring that modernism
inexorably reaches a dead end. The modernist hope and belief
that intellectuals can occupy a space outside capitalist society
is not only illusionary but also artistically and politically
sterile. The purity of the alienated artist forecloses his [sic]
access to the energies and disputes that are lived within the
culture, while also severing his connection to any audience
beyond the purlieu of the artistic elite. The modernist places
himself high and dry. Mass or popular culture inevitably springs
up to fill the vacuum created by the elitist artists' divorce
>from a wide audience. By following the path of its own aesthetic
revolution and its fetishistically precious values, modern art
distances itself from any social group large enough, central
enough, or powerful enough to effect a social revolution. Post-
modernism must entirely rethink the relation of intellectuals to
the rest of society. A model of engagement must replace the
model of alienation...." (McGowan 25)
**
(7) "What I want to call postmodernism in fiction paradoxically
uses and abuses the conventions of both realism and modernism,
and does so in order to challenge their transparency, in order to
prevent glossing over the contradictions that make the postmodern
what it is: historical and metafictional, contextual and self-
reflexive, ever aware of its status as discourse, as a human con-
struct." (Hutcheon 1988, 53)
**
(8) "Postmodernism is the somewhat weasel word now being used to
describe the garbled situation of art in the '80s. It is a term
which nobody quite fully understands, because no clear-cut
definition of it has yet been put forward. Its use arose
synonymously with that of pluralism toward the end of the '70s,
and at that point it referred to the loss of faith in a stylistic
mainstream, as if the whole history of styles had suddenly come
unstuck. Since then, under the more recent umbrella of Neo-
expressionism, the old stylistic divisions now mix, blend, and
alternate interchangeably with each other: dogmatism and exclu-
sivity have given way to openness and coexistence. Pluralism
abolishes controls; it gives the impression that everything is
permitted. Meeting with no limitation, the artist is free to
express himself in whatever way he wishes.
"If modernism was ideological at heart--full of strenuous dic-
tates about what art could, and could not, be--postmodernism is
much more eclectic, able to assimilate, and even plunder, all
forms of style and genre and circumstance, and tolerant of multi-
plicity and conflicting values." (Gablik 73)
**
(9) "Simplifying to the extreme, I define *postmodern* as
incredulity toward metanarratives." (Lyotard 1984, xxiv)
**
(10) "Lyotard explains the necessity of thinking in `open
systems' without internal unity on the basis of the disintegra-
tion of the possibility of maintaining a universal metalanguage.
This possibility presupposes that the individual language games
through which we perspectively live our Being-in-the-world can be
gone beyond by some sort of speech that itself is not relative.
Such nonrelative speech, for its part, presupposes an authority
that modern metaphysics conceives as `the Absolute.' If it can
be demonstrated--and Derrida has shown this more clearly than
Lyotard--that the thought of the Absolute itself cannot escape
the `structurality of structure,' then one can no longer lay
claim to a transhistorical frame of orientation beyond linguistic
differentiality. Systems without internal unity and without
absolute center become the inescapable condition of our *Dasein*
and our orientation in the world." (Manfred Frank. _What is
Neostructuralism?_. Trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray. Min-
neapolis: U of Minn. Press, 1989. Transl. of _Was ist Neostruk-
turalismus?_. 1984.)
**
(11) "The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts
forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which
denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of taste
which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia
for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations,
not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger
sense of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist or writer is in
the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he
produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules,
and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by
applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those
rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking
for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules
in order to formulate the rules of what *will have been done*.
Hence the fact that work and text have the characters of an
*event*; hence also, they always come too late for their author,
or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work,
their realization (*mise en oeuvre*) always begin too soon.
*Post modern* would have to be understood according to the
paradox of the future (*post*) anterior (*modo*)." (Lyotard 1984,
81)
**
(12) "The unity of all that allows itself to be attempted today
through the most diverse concepts of science and of writing, is,
in principle, more or less covertly yet always, determined by an
historico-metaphysical epoch of which we merely glimpse the
*closure*. I do not say the *end*. [...]
"Perhaps patient meditation and painstaking investigation on
and around what is still provisionally called writing, far from
falling short of a science of writing or of hastily dismissing it
by some obscurantist reaction, letting it rather develop its
positivity as far as possible, are the wanderings of a way of
thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world
of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the
closure of knowledge.
"The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute
danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted
normality and can only be proclaimed, *presented*, as a sort of
monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which
will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writ-
ing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet
no exergue." (Jacques Derrida, from the "Exergue" to _Of Gram-
matology_. Trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1974,
1976. 4-5. Transl. of _De la Grammatologie_. 1967.) (Note:
"Exergue (ig-zurg), n. the small space beneath the principal
design on a coin or medal for the insertion of a date, etc."
_Websters_, Pocket Books-Simon & Schuster, 1990.)
**
(13) "Postmodernity does not imply a *change* in the values of
Enlightenment modernity but rather a particular weakening of
their absolutist character. It is therefore necessary to delimit
an analytic terrain from whose standpoint this weakening is
thinkable and definable. This terrain is neither arbitrary nor
freely accessible to the imagination, but on the contrary it is
the historical sedimentation of a set of traditions whose common
denominator is the collapse of the immediacy of the *given*. We
may thus propose that the intellectual history of the twentieth
century was constituted on the basis of three illusions of
immediacy (the referent, the phenomenon, and the sign) that gave
rise to the three intellectual traditions of analytical
philosophy, phenomenology, and structuralism. The crisis of that
illusion of immediacy did not, however, result solely from the
abandonment of those categories but rather from a weakening of
their aspirations to constitute full presences and from the ensu-
ing proliferation of language-games which it was possible to
develop around them. This crisis of the absolutist pretensions
of `the immediate' is a fitting starting point for engaging those
intellectual operations that characterize the specific
`weakening' we call postmodernity." (Ernesto Laclau, "Politics
and the Limits of Modernity," in Docherty, op cit., 332).
**
(14) "Perhaps the clearest formulation of the difference of post-
modern invention from modernist innovation comes in _The Post-
modern Condition_, where Lyotard distinguishes the *paralogism*
that characterizes pagan or postmodern aesthetic invention from
the merely *innovative* function of art that is characteristic of
the modernist understanding of the avant-garde. Innovation seeks
to make a new move with the rules of the language game `art', so
as to revivify the truth of art. Paralogism seeks the move that
will displace the rules of the game, the `impossible' or
unforeseeable move. Innovation refines the efficiency of the
system, whereas the paralogical move changes the rules in the
pragmatics of knowledge. It may well be the fate of a paralogi-
cal move to be reduced to innovation as the system adapts itself
(one can read Picasso this way), but this is not the necessary
outcome. The invention may produce more inventions. Roughly
speaking, the condition of art is postmodern or paralogical when
it both is and is not art at the same time (e.g., Sherri Levine's
appropriative rephotographings of `art photography')." (Bill
Readings. _Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics_. New York:
Routledge, 1991. 73-4)
**
(15) "Postmodern architecture finds itself condemned to undertake
a series of minor modifications in a space inherited from modern-
ity, condemned to abandon a global reconstruction of the space of
human habitation. The perspective then opens onto a vast
landscape, in the sense that there is no longer any horizon of
universality, universalization, or general emancipation to greet
the eye of postmodern man, least of all the eye of the architect.
The disappearance of the Idea that rationality and freedom are
progressing would explain a `tone,' style, or mode specific to
postmodern architecture. I would say it is a sort of
`bricolage': the multiple quotation of elements taken from ear-
lier styles or periods, classical and modern; disregard for the
environment; and so on." (Lyotard 1993, 76)
**
(16) "There is ... a wholesale espousal of aesthetic ideology in
the name of `postmodernism' and its claim to have moved way
beyond the old dispensation of truth, critique, and suchlike
enlightenment values. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of this
current intellectual scene is the extent to which fashionable
`left' alternatives (like the ideas canvassed in MARXISM TODAY)
have set about incorporating large chunks of the Thatcherite
cultural and socio-political agenda while talking portentously of
`New Times' and claiming support from postmodernist gurus like
Baudrillard. For we have now lived on - so these thinkers urge -
into an epoch of pervasive `hyperreality', an age of mass-media
simulation, opinion-poll feedback, total publicity and so forth,
with the result that it is no longer possible (if indeed it ever
was) to distinguish truth from falsehood, or to cling to those
old `enlightenment' values of reason, critique, and adequate
ideas. Reality just *is* what we are currently given to make of
it by these various forms of seductive illusion. In fact we might
as well give up using such terms, since they tend to suggest that
there is still some genuine distinction to be drawn between truth
and untruth, `science' and `ideology', knowledge and what is pre-
sently `good in the way of belief'. On the contrary, says
Baudrillard: if there is one thing we should have learned by now
it is the total obsolescence of all such ideas, along with the
enlightenment meta-narrative myths - whether Kantian-liberal,
Hegelian, Marxist or whatever - that once underwrote their
delusive claims. What confronts us now is an order of pure
`simulacra' which no longer needs to disguise or dissimulate the
absence of any final truth-behind-appearances." (Norris 1990;
23)
**
(17) "I begin with what appears to be the most startling fact
about postmodernism: its total acceptance of the ephemerality,
fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic that formed the one
half of Baudelaire's conception of modernity. But postmodernism
responds to the fact of that in a very particular way. It does
not try to transcend it, counteract it, or even to define the
`eternal and immutable' elements that lie within it. Post-
modernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic
currents of change as if that is all there is. Foucault [in the
"Preface" to Deleuze and Guattari's _Anti-Oedipus_ (U of Minn.
Press, 1983. xiii)] instructs us, for example, to `develop
actions, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition,
and disjunction,' and `to prefer what is positive and multiple,
difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrange-
ments over systems. Believe that what is productive is not
sedentary but nomadic.' To the degree that it does try to legit-
imate itself by reference to the past, therefore, postmodernism
typically harks back to that wing of thought, Nietzsche in par-
ticular, that emphasizes the deep chaos of modern life and its
intractability before rational thought. This does not imply,
however, that postmodernism is simply a version of modernism;
real revolutions in sensibility can occur when latent and
dominated ideas in one period become explicit and dominant in
another. Nevertheless, the continuity of the condition of frag-
mentation, ephemerality, discontinuity, and chaotic change in
both modernist and postmodernist thought is important." (Harvey
44)
**
(18) "Postmodernism, then, is a mode of consciousness (and *not*,
it should be emphasized, a historical period) that is highly
suspicious of the belief in shared speech, shared values, and
shared perceptions that some would like to believe form our cul-
ture but which in fact may be no more than empty, if necessary,
fictions." (Olsen 143)
**
(19) "The point is that there *are* new standards, new standards
of beauty and style and taste. The new sensibility is defiantly
pluralistic; it is dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness
and to fun and wit and nostalgia. It is also extremely history-
conscious; and the voracity of its enthusiasms (and of the super-
cession of these enthusiasms) is very high-speed and hectic.
>From the vantage point of this new sensibility, the beauty of the
machine or of the solution to a mathematical problem, of a paint-
ing by Jasper Johns, of a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the
personalities and music of the Beatles is equally accessible."
(Sontag 304)
**
(20) "All my life I have worked to establish distinctions with
the areas covered by umbrella-terms such as iconism, code,
presupposition, etc. Naturally I am intrigued by the term
`postmodern.' It is my impression that it is applied these days
to everything the speaker approves of. On the other hand, there
seems to be an attempt to move it backwards in time; first it
seemed to suit writers or artists active in the last twenty
years, then gradually it was moved back to the beginning of the
century, then even further back, and the march goes on; before
long Homer himself will be considered postmodern.
But I believe that this tendency is to some extent justified.
I agree with those who consider postmodern not a chronologically
circumscribed tendency but a spiritual category, or better yet a
*Kunstwollen* (a Will-to-Art), perhaps a stylistic device and/or
a world view. We could say that every age has its own post-
modern, just as every age has its own form of mannerism (in fact,
I wonder if postmodern is not simply the modern name for
*Manierismus*...). I believe that every age reaches moments of
crisis like those described by Nietzsche in the second of the
_Untimely Considerations_, on the harmfulness of the study of
history. The sense that the past is restricting, smothering,
blackmailing us." (Umberto Eco, "A Correspondence on Post-
modernism" with Stefano Rosso in Hoesterey, op cit., pp. 242-3)
{5.0}
A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Note: There is a huge and growing literature on postmodernism. This
bibliography is selective and reflects the author's own interests and
background. It is more devoted to cultural theory and philosophy than
to fiction and the arts generally, though see Ferguson and Gablik for
extended interviews and discussions on the fine arts and performance
arts, and see Venturi and Portoghesi on architecture. For the relations
between postmodernism and science, I suggest that there are worse places
to start than the works of Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Bruno Latour,
Michel Serres, Katherine Hayles, Gregory Bateson and Donna Haraway. For
a good review of Latour see especially an essay by Robert Koch, "The
Case of Latour" in _Configurations_ V. 3 No. 3, Fall 1995.
One of the most extensive bibliographies on postmodernism
available, though only for material published prior to 1989, is in
Connor (cited below). Other useful bibliographies are in Hutcheon
(1989; see especially the "Concluding Note: Some Directed Reading,"
169-70) and Docherty, which offers more recent information (1993).
Some people have asked for a section on performance theory and
I'd be glad to oblige anyone who wants to put one together and have it
attributed to them in this FAQ. If you're waiting for me to do it, it
will be some time. It will require coverage of popular culture studies,
media studies, video art, drama and music--you get the picture.
{5.1}
SOME PRINCIPAL THEORISTS
Baudrillard, Jean. _Simulations_. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Debord, Guy. _Society of the Spectacle_. English Transl. 1970.
Rev. Transl. Detroit: Black & Red, 1977. Rpt. 1983. Transl. of
_La societe du spectacle_. 1967.
---. _Comments on the Society of the Spectacle_. Transl. Malcolm
Imrie. London: Verso, 1990. Transl. of _La Societe du spec-
tacle_. 1988.
Jameson, Fredric. _Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism_. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. _The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge_. Transl. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword
by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: U of Minn. Press, 1984. Transl.
of _La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir_. 1979.
---. _The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985_. Ed.
Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Transls. by Don Barry,
Bernadette Maher, Julian Pefanis, Virginia Spate, and Morgan
Thomas. Afterword by Wlad Gozich. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota
Press, 1993. Transl. of _Le Postmoderne explique aux enfants_.
1988.
Portoghesi, Pier Paolo. _Aftern Modern Architecture_. New York:
Rizzoli, 1982.
Vattimo, Gianni. _The Transparent Society_. Transl. David Webb.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Transl. of _La societa
trasparente_. 1989.
Venturi, Robert, and Denise Scott and Steven Izenor. _Learning
>from Las Vegas_. 1972. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977.
{5.2}
GENERAL WORKS, ANTHOLOGIES, INTERVENTIONS
Appignanesi, Lisa, ed. _Postmodernism: ICA documents_. London:
Free Association Books, 1989.
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. _Postmodern Theory: Critical
Interrogations_. New York: Guilford Press, 1991.
Connor, Steven. _Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to
Theories of the Contemporary_. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.
Docherty, Thomas. ed. _Postmodernism: a reader_. New York: Colum-
bia UP, 1993.
Elam, Diane. _Romancing the Postmodern_. New York: Routledge,
1992.
Featherston, M., ed. _Postmodernism_ London: SAGE, 1988.
Ferguson, Russell, et al., eds. _Discourses: Conversations in
Postmodern Art and Culture_. Cambridge: MIT Press; New York: The
New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990.
Foster, Hal, ed. _The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern
Culture_. Seatle, WA: Bay Press, 1985.
Foster, Hal. _Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics_.
Seatle, WA: Bay Press, 1985.
Foster, Stephen William. "Symbolism and the Problematics of Postmodern
Representation," _Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural
Criticism_. Ed. Kathleen M. Ashley. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
117-37.
Giroux, Henry A. "Slacking Off: Border Youth and Postmodern
Education." JAC ISSUE 14.2 FALL 1994.
http://nsferau.cas.usf.edu/JAC/archive/dir142.html
Harvey, David. _The Condition of Postmodernity_. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989.
Hoesterey, Ingeborg, ed. _Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodernist
Controversy_. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
Hutcheon, Linda. _The Politics of Postmodernism_. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1989.
---. _A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction_.
New York: Routledge, 1988.
Huyssen, Andreas. _After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Cul-
ture, Postmodernism_. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1986.
Jencks, Charles. "The Postmodern Agenda," in _The Postmodern
Reader_. Ed. Charles Jencks. New York: St. Martin's, 1992. 10-
39.
Lash, Scott. _The Sociology of Postmodernism._ New York: Rout-
ledge, 1990.
McGowan, John. _Postmodernism and Its Critics_. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1991.
Morris, Meaghan. "At Henry Parkes Motel," _Cultural Studies_
(1988) 2:1-47
Norris, Christopher. _What's Wrong with Postmodernism?_.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
---. _The Truth about Postmodernism_. London: Blackwell, 1993.
Palmer, Richard. "The Postmodernity of Heidegger," _Martin Heidegger and
the Question of Literature: Toward a Postmodern Literary Hermeneutics_.
Ed. William V. Spanos. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. 71-92.
Probyn, E. "Bodies and anti-bodies: feminism and postmodernism,"
_Cultural Studies_ (1987) 1:3, 349-60.
Rowe, John Carlos. "Postmodernist Studies," _Redrawing the Boundaries_.
Eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: Modern Language
Association, 1992. 179-208. Contains a short annotated bibliography.
Squires, Judith. _Principled Positions: Postmodernism and the
Rediscovery of Value_. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1993.
Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud and Donald Morton. _Theory, (Post)Modernity,
Opposition: An "Other" Introduction to Literary and Cultural
Theory_. Washington, D.C.: Masionneuve Press, 1991.
{5.3}
ON MODERNITY, MODERNISM AND THE AVANT-GARDE
Berman, Marshall. _All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experi-
ence of Modernity_. NY: Viking-Penguin, 1982. New Pref. 1988.
Bradbury, Malcolm, and James McFarlane, eds. _Modernism: A Guide
to European Literature, 1890-1930_. 1976. New Preface. New
York: Penguin Books, 1991.
Burger, Peter. _The Theory of the Avant-Garde_. Transl. Michael
Shaw. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1984. Transl. of
_Theorie der Avantgarde_. 1974.
Calinescu, Matei. _Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-
Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism_. 1977. Rev. ed. Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 1987.
Eysteinsson, Astradur. _The Concept of Modernism_. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Faulkner, Peter. _Modernism_. London: Methuen, 1977.
Gablik, Susan. _Has Modernism Failed?_. London: Thames and Hudson,
1984.
Giddens, Anthony. _Modernity and Self Identity_. Oxford: Polity Press,
1991.
Habermas, Jurgen. _The Philosphical Discourse of Modernity:
Twelve Lectures_. Transl. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1987. Transl. of _Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne:
Zwolf Vorlesungen_. 1985.
Naremore, James, and Patrick Brantlinger. _Modernity and Mass
Culture_. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
Perloff, Margorie. "Modernist Studies," _Redrawing the Boundaries_.
Eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: Modern Language
Association, 1992. 154-78. Contains a short annotated bibliography.
Taylor, Charles. _Sources of the Self_. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1989.
Williams, Raymond. _The Politics of Modernism: Against the New
Conformists_. London: Verso, 1989.
{5.4}
POSTMODERNISM AND RELIGION
Smith, Huston. _Beyond the Post-Modern Mind_. 1982. New York:
Crossroad Publishing; Wheaton, IL: Quest-Theosophical Publishing
House, 1984.
POSTMODERNISM AND JAPAN
Miyoshi, Masao and H. D. Harootunian, eds. _Postmodernism and
Japan_. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1989.
POSTMODERNISM AND CYBERPUNK
Olsen, Lance. "Cyberpunk and the Crisis of Postmodernity," in
_Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative_. Eds.
George Slusser and Tom Shippey. Athens, GA: U of Georgia Press,
1992. 142-152.
{6.0}
******
DIGEST OF TWO EXCHANGES ON AN ALT.POSTMODERN
(Contributors: Omar Haneef, Mark Weinles, Gordon Fitch, David F. Black,
Michael McGee, N.S. "Cris" Brown, PR...@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU, Andy Perry,
Allan Liska and Gene Angelcyk)
<------------------------------------------
Has been cut, but you might wish to know that Gordon now calls himself G*RD*N,
for reasons know only to himself; and Mark Weinles now calls himself both Moggin
and Puss In Boots, possibly through fear of his radical views identifying him as
indulging in un-American activities, such as bahji cooking.
Puss in Boots
alt.pomo FAQ
So You Want To Know About Post-Modernism?
Alright then, here are the ABC's: in specific, an assembly, a
bibliography, and a conversation. Comments, questions, requests,
criticism to mog...@mindspring.com -- or better yet, post them on alt.
pomo.
"Don't start me talking'
I'll tell everything I know
Gonna break up this signifyin'
Everything's got to go!"
(Sonny Boy Williamson)
Part One: An Assembly
As they step into the same rivers, other and still other
waters flow upon them.
The problem of the value of truth came before us -- or was it
we who came before the problem? Which of us is Oedipus here, and
which the Sphinx? We are at a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and
of question marks.
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out;
The Sunne is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him, where to looke for it.
And freely men confesse, that this world's spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seeke so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out againe to his Atomis.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation:
Prince, subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that there can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
How many stars have our telescopes revealed to us which did
not exist for our philosophers of old! ... The final judgement of
reason is to admit that there is an infinity of things which are
beyond it. Reason is but feeble if it cannot see this far.
A star is gone! A star is gone!
There is a blank is heaven.
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
Propositions can represent the whole reality, but they cannot
represent what they must have in common with reality in order to be
able to represent it -- the logical form. To be able to represent
logical form, we should have to be able to put ourselves with the
propositions outside logic, that is outside the world.
Il n'y a pas de hors texte.
Whither is God?" the madman cried; "I will tell you. We have
killed him -- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we
do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to
wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained
the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we
moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward,
sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any way up or
down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not
feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not the
night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns
in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the
gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the
divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains
dead. And we have killed him.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly
revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the
relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.
Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on
the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier
industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production,
uninterrrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all
earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of
ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all
new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is
solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last
compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and
his relations with his kind.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are filled with a passionate intensity.
...twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rought beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Perhaps patient meditation and painstaking investigation on
and around what it still provisionally called writing, far from
falling short of a science of writing or of hastily dismissing it by
some obscurantist reaction, letting it rather develop its own
positivity as far as possible, are the wanderings of a way of thinking
that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future
which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge.
The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger.
It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can
only be proclaimed, _presented_, as sort of monstrosity.
Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain
circles it already has come, when language is most efficiently used
where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate
language all at once, we should at least leave nothing beind that
would contribute to its falling into disprepute. To bore one hole
after another in it, until what lurks behind it -- be it something or
nothing -- begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for
a writer today.
A thinking man's answer to the question whether he is a
nihilist would probably be, 'Not enough.'
One must even go further: in a sense, the mythologist is
excluded from the history in the name of which he professes to act.
The havoc he wreaks in the name of the community is absolute for him,
it fills his assignment to the brim; he must live this assignment
without any hope of going back or any assumption of payment. It is
forbidden for him to imagine what the world will concretely be like,
when the immediate object of his criticism has disppeared. Utopia is
an impossible luxury for him: he greatly doubts that tomorrow's truths
will be the exact reverse of today's lies. History never insures the
triumph pure and simple of something over its opposite: it unveils,
while making itself, unimaginable solutions, unforseeable syntheses.
The mythologist is not even in a Moses-like situation: he cannot see
the Promised Land. For him, tomorrow's positivity is entirely hidden
by today's negativity. All the values of his undertaking appear to
him as acts of destruction: the latter accurately cover the former,
nothing protrudes. The subjective grasp of history in which the
potent seed of the future _is nothing but_ the most profound
apocalypse of the past has been expressed by Saint-Just in a strange
saying: '_What constitutes the Republic is the total destruction of
what is opposed to it_.' This must not, I think, be understood in the
trivial sense of 'One has to clear the way before reconstructing.'
The copula has an exhaustive meaning: there is for some men a
subjective dark night of history where the future becomes an essense,
the essential destruction of the past.
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as
they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and
transmitted from the past. The tradition of the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
What is now happening to Marx's doctrine has, in the course
of history, often happened to the doctrines of other revolutionary
thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation.
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes
have visited relentlesss persecution on them and received their
teaching with the most savage hostility, the most furious hatred, the
most ruthless campaign of lies and slanders. After their death,
attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons, canonise them, and
surround their names with a certain halo for the 'consolation' of the
oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the
same time emasculating and vulgarising the real essence of their
revolutionary theories and blunting their revolutionary edge. At the
present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labour
movement are co-operating in this work of adulterating Marxism. They
omit, obliterate, and distort the revolutionary side of its teaching,
its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what
is, or seems, acceptable to the bourgeoisie.
It is much easier to point out the faults and errors in the
work of a great mind than to give a distinct and full exposition of
its value. For the faults are particular and finite, and can
therefore be fully comprehended; while, on the contrary, the very
stamp which genius impresses upon its works is that their excellence
is unfathomable and inexhaustible.
As the water that is displaced by a ship immediately flows in
again behind it, so when great minds have driven error aside and made
room for themselves, it very quickly closes in behind them.
Pas d'au-dela
Part Two: Bibliography
This is a highly selective reading-list. It's designed to
spotlight some of the works associated with post-modernism and to
offer a way in. Qualifications: it includes only works of theory,
criticism, and philosophy, and makes no effort to be comprehensive,
even there. I haven't even tried to address post-modernism in
literature, not to speak about painting and architecture, feminism,
sociology, anthropology, etc., etc.
One other note: "Post-modernism" is a misnomer insofar as it
implies that modernism and post-modernism are diametrically opposed.
(My view is that "late modernism" would have been a much better choice
of words, if there had been moment of choosing.) Since the two are
part of the same continuum (Lyotard speaks of post-modernism as the
"acceleration of modernism"), I've happily included both modernist and
post-modernist items, along with certain works that don't fall into
category, but contribute to the discussion.
Blake, William:
_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_
Marx, Karl:
"The Communist Manifesto"
_The German Ideology_
_Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844_
_The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonoparte_
Kierkegaard, Soren:
_The Concept of Dread_
_The Sickness Unto Death_
_Fear and Trembling_
_Philosophical Fragments_
_Concluding Unscientific Postscript_
Nietzsche, Friederich:
_The Gay Science_
_Thus Spake Zarathustra_
_Beyond Good and Evil_
_The Will to Power_
"On Truth and Falsity"
Freud, Sigmund:
_The Interpretation of Dreams_
"Civilization and its Discontents"
"Beyond the Pleasure Principle"
"A History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement"
Heidegger, Martin:
_Being and Time_, Introduction
"What is Metaphysics?"
_Introduction to Metaphysics_.
_Basic Writings_, ed. David Farrell Krell
Wittgenstein, Ludwig:
_Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_
_Philosophical Investigations_
_On Culture and Value_
"Lecture on Ethics"
Kafka, Franz:
"Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way"
_Parables and Paradoxes_
Beckett, Samuel:
_Disjecta_
Woolf, Virginia:
"Modern Fiction"
Eliot. T.S:
"Tradition and the Individual Talent"
"The Metaphysical Poets"
"Baudelaire"
"Hamlet"
"_Ulysses_, Order, and Myth"
Pound, Ezra:
_ABC of Reading_
_Guide to Kulchur_
Lawrence, D.H.:
"Surgery for the Novel -- or a Bomb"
"Art and Morality"
"Morality and the Novel"
"Why the Novel Matters"
"Benjamin Franklin"
Lenin, V.I.:
_State and Revolution_
Luxemburg, Rosa:
"The Russian Revolution"
"Leninism or Marxism?"
Benjamin, Walter:
_Illuminations_ (ed. Hannah Arendt)
_Reflections_ (ed. Peter Demetz)
_One-Way Street_
Adorno, Theodor:
_Prisms_
_Aesthetic Theory_
_Negative Dialectics_
_Minima Moralia_
Marcuse, Herbert:
"Repressive Tolerance"
_The Aesthetic Dimension_
_An Essay on Liberation_
Arendt, Hannah:
_Men in Dark Times_
Steiner, George:
_In Bluebeard's Castle_
_After Babel_
_On Difficulty_
_Language and Silence_
Althusser, Louis:
_Lenin and Philosophy_
Lacan, Jacques:
_Ecrits_
Derrida, Jacques:
_Writing and Difference_
_Margins of Philosophy_
_Spurs_
_Positions_
de Man, Paul:
_Allegories of Reading_
_The Rhetoric of Romanticism_
_Blindness and Insight_
Barthes, Roland:
_Image-Music-Text_
_Mythologies_
_Barthes by Barthes_
_Empire of Signs_
_A Barthes Reader_ (ed. Susan Sontag)
Foucault, Michel:
_Madness and Civilization_
_The Order of Things_
_Discipline and Punish_
_Power/Knowledge
_The History of Sexuality, Vol. One_
_The Foucault Reader_ (ed. Paul Rabinow)
Deleuze, Giles:
"Nomad Thought" (in _The New Nietzsche_,
ed. David B. Allison.)
w/ Felix Guattari:
_Anti-Oedipus_
_A Thousand Plateaus_
Borges, Jorge Luis:
"Kafka and his Precursors"
"A New Refutation of Time"
"Avatars of the Tortoise"
"Pierre Menard, Author of the _Quixote_"
"Partial Magic in the _Quixote_"
"Parable of Cervantes and of the _Quixote_"
"The Mirror of Enigmas"
"A Problem"
"The Library of Babel"
"Borges and I"
Fielder, Leslie:
"No, In Thunder!"
Barth, John:
"The Literature of Exhaustion"
Cioran, E.M.:
_The Temptation to Exist_
_A Short History of Decay_
_The New Gods_
_Drawn and Quartered_
Sontag, Susan:
_Against Interpretation_
_Under the Sign of Saturn_
_Styles of Radical Will_
Percy, Walker:
_Message in a Bottle_
_Lost in the Cosmos_
Summaries, Overviews, Idiot's Guides, etc.:
Generally speaking, these things are worse than useless, and
practically none are worth the time it takes to read them. However,
there are a handful of exceptions. Here are three of the better ones:
Hugh Kenner:
_The Pound Era_ (High Modernism)
Vincent Descombes:
_Modern French Philosophy_ (Structuralism, Semiology,
Post-Structuralism, etc.)
Greil Marcus:
_Lipstick Traces_ (Dada and the Situationists, both
of which are inexcusably missing from the list above.)
Part Three: A Conversation
(Alt.pomo, early 1995.)
Phil0123:
To my mind, postmodernism is the banishment of anysort of underlying
premise. No matter the topic discussed, postmodernism will only
entertain a premise as a tentative assertion so as an edifice can be
constructed (a message conveyed). But no premise is accepted as an
axiom.
Jim Elson:
I think this is a good functional definition which arises from
post-modern critiques of the Western tradition. The only problem is
that it may leave some wondering why post-modern thought refuses to
accept any premise as "given"/"self-evident".
Mark:
But this line of criticism _is_ part of "the Western tradition," and
has been part of it for quite some time -- there's nothing especially
"post-modern" about it, except in the sense that postmodernism is the
latest effort to make it look new. Seems to be working pretty well.
(I used to think there was something called "postmodernism" that _did_
"critique the Western tradition," as well a closely related movement
known as "modernism" which delivered some blows of its own; but I must
have been imagining them both.)
Michael Calvin McGee:
Two comments on terms, <premise> and <integrity>.
<premise> au contraire, Mark: pm is the elevation and celebration of
premises. It is, at least in part, the claim that all of the alleged
"facts" from which reasoned opinions are supposed to flow are in fact
:):) only <premises> from which power claims (you should, must,
believe/act such-and-such way) arise. The result, as you rightly
observe, is a kind of re-worked relativism.
Mark:
I don't see where you're contradicting me. As far as I can tell, we
agree that what's called "postmodern" is often merely the repetition
of a familiar theme -- a business of putting old wine in new bottles.
However, I also noted that the term "postmodernism" has another sense,
in which it refers to the analysis of that rather shady practice.
(This confusion of meanings isn't an accident or a simple mistake.)
Your example (basically a paraphrase of Nietzsche's observation that
"There are no facts; only interpretations") goes considerably further
than what I described before as "garden-variety relativism." It bears
genuinely vertiginous implications. Even though Nietzsche is sometimes
cubby-holed as a perspectivist, comments like this show why he doesn't
fit into the box. And as far as postmodernism follows him, it can't be
be filed away, either (at least not without filing off its rough edges).
Michael:
Consider that any attempt to explain the Simpson trial would have to
result in "relativist" thinking, but surely you would not hold that
traditional philosophical critiques of "relativism" would refute +any+
of the interpretive strands?
Mark:
Surely not -- I hold no brief for "traditional philosophical
critiques." I just don't see any reason to call platitudes like
"everyone has their own perspective" and "there are no absolutes"
"postmodern." Unfortunately, that's just what a good deal of so-called
"postmodernism" boils down to.
Michael:
The point of seeking <integrity> is not to reaffirm existing
institutions, nor even to endorse a wholly mechanistic view of social
organization. "Humpty Dumpty had a great fall." Disgruntled
modernists such as Don Hirsch (cultural illiteracy) want to put Humpty
together again. Many postmodernists, such as Jean Baudrillard, try to
make a living out of telling the world that Humpty has indeed fallen
(a bit of journalism in their tone, but mostly whining about having to
endure exposure to Humpty's gooey innards). Those who aspire to
<integrity> are asking What can we make of egg shells?
Mark:
Then you need a better word -- to have integrity means (among other
things) to be whole and complete. (Thus the arguments in favor of
montage, parataxis, bricolage, etc.) But whatever term you choose,
you're doing the work of the King's horses and the King's men: you're
putting Humpty Dumpty together again, even if you decide to glue his
pieces into a different shape.
Which is the point I was making to start with: replacing "axioms" with
"tentative assertions" is a way of "constructing an edifice" when the
old foundations are cracked. "The King is dead; long live the King!"
is the motto for all projects of this kind. Foucault said that we need
to decapitate the King, but as he knew, power is infinitely capable of
recapitulating itself.
P.S. Hirsch a modernist? Come, now.
Omar Haneef:
I allign the Enlightenment with modernism and postmodernism
becomes what comes after them. Modernism is an extension of the
enlightenment in my mind. Postmodernism reacts against the
canonization of the subversive project of modernism which is why the
author had to die.
Mark:
Then you've erased postmodernism from the map: there isn't
even a place for it in your schema.
Omar:
Au contraire (that was tongue in cheek). I can't possibly see where
YOU situate post-modernism. In "our" model, we see enlightenment/
modernism = belief in reality -> postmodernism = Reality in flux. IF
your model is enlightenment = belief in reality -> modernism = reality
in flux -> postmodernism = ?. My question is: Where is postmodernism
on YOUR map?
Mark:
I would say that modernism questions truth on truth on behalf
of truth, while postmodernism deepens that questioning when it calls
the concept and value of truth into doubt. Where modernism depicts a
world in flux, contrasting it with the idea that the basic features of
existence are set in concrete, postmodernism suggests that reality has
always been plastic and malleable. Similarly, where modernism employs
fragmentation as a strategy against "the rule and power of the whole,"
(Marcuse), postmodernism offers its suspicion that fragmentation has
itself taken on the role of an ordering principle. Post-modernism
both criticizes and intensifies the questioning begun by modernism,
per se. Thus modernism says, "Question authority!" and postmodernism
adds, "But don't listen to the answer." Modernism observes that "all
that is solid melts into air;" postmodernism replies, "And then it
starts raining."
What do you see as subversive about "the project of modernism,"
and what do you think it subverts? (I'm not suggesting that the
answer is nothing, whatsoever -- just asking for more details about
your view.)
Omar:
When I said that, I was thinking primarily of modernist texts
(Joyce, Faulkner) who employ narrative strategies to obscure
authority, betray reader-author contracts, ignore conventions of time
and/or space and are generally unapologetic about their subjective
choices.
Mark:
That makes perfect sense to me, but I don't see how it jibes
with what you said about modernism before, when you wrote that you
align modernism with the Enlightenment. While I think of both Joyce
and Faulkner as exemplary modernists, neither one of them has very
close ties with the Enlightenment: they're separated by centuries in
time and an equal distance in sensibility. The same goes for your
description of their writing -- it applies to Joyce and Faulkner, but
clearly it doesn't fit the Enlightenment very well. Are you using the
word "modern" in two different ways? (That's one of the main sources
of confusion about the relationship between modernism and p-modernism.)
Omar:
What is the difference between calling truth into question and
questioning the concept and value of truth? I understand, I think,
what you are describing as the pomo stance, that is "Why bother about
the truth? What can truth even mean?" But what is it that the
modernists did not see (in your model)? How could they be questioning
truth and still looking for it?
Mark:
That's not what I was getting at, so let me try again. Purely
as an analogy, consider Prof. Kant. (Using Kant as an example risks
the confusion between modernism and the Enlightenment we were stuck in
above. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that Kant's philosophy was a
sample of modernism -- I'm only using it as a way illustrating my
point.) The _Critique of Pure Reason_ questions reason on behalf of
reason, without ever calling reason, per se, into question. (That
would have been the opposite of Kant's purpose.) By comparison, the
modernist critique of truth goes considerably further, since it
questions truth as conceived by philosophy, science, and religion.
But that questioning is carried out in the name of truth, while post-
modernism addresses the value of truth, itself. That's a deepening of
the questions asked by modernism, not a turning away of the kind in
your two examples. Asking "why do we want truth?" or "what then is
truth?" is different than saying "why bother with truth?" or "what can
truth even mean?" Those aren't questions -- they're just shrugs.
Omar:
Plastic and malleable IS flux. What is the difference?
Mark:
If plastic was flux, Mattel would be out of business -- but
that's not exactly the point. Put it this way: modernism advocates
Becoming over and against the rule of Being. The theory is that Being
is a static entity which imposes itself on the world and prohibits the
possibility of change. Postmodernism replies that Being is both
produced and maintained through the process of Becoming, and that
"change" is merely a nickname for the status quo. Or take the Mattel
example seriously. Modernism wants to remold the world and begins by
emphasizing that reality is malleable, contrary to both government
propaganda and popular belief; post-modernism says yes, that's true
enough, but the world is being continuously remolded, with observably
poor results: in fact, that's how it got this way, in the first place.
[End of FAQ]