Definition of PoMo
ilan pillemer
Here is a short (not soooooo many words) precis of Brian Mchale's attempt
to provide a way of systemising postmodernism into a graspable category.
"one thing is certain: the referent of "postmodernism,", the thing to
which the term claims to refer, does not exist [P]ostmodernism, the
thing, does not exist precisely in the way that "the Renaissance" or
"romanticism" do not exist. There is no postmodernism "out there" in the
world any more than there ever was a Renaissance or a romaticism "out
there". They are all literary-historical fictions, discursive artifacts
constructed either by contemporary readers and writers or retrospectively
by literary historians we can discriminate among constructions of
postmodernism all of them are finally fictions." [4]
So what criteria to be used to discriminate?
1. The criterion of self-consistency and internal coherence.
2. The criterion of scope.
3. The criterion of productiveness i.e. produces new insights, new or
richer connections, coherence of a different degree or kind, ultimately
more discourse, in the form of follow-up research, new interpretations,
criticisms and refinements, of the construct itself, counter-proposals,
refutations, polemics.
4. Criterion of interest. [4]
So how does this construct understand its referent?
"a poetics which is the successor of, or possibly a reaction against, the
poetics of early twentieth-century modernism"
"historical consequence rather than temporal posteriority."
"If we can construct an argument about how the posterior phenomenon
emerges from its predecessor - about, in other words, historical
consequentiality." [5]
So how does it argue this "consequentiality"?
"[W]e need a tool for describing how one set of literary forms emerge from
a historically prior set of forms. That tool can be found in the Russian
formalist concept of the dominant."
"Despite his claim about the monolithic character of literary history
organized in terms of a series of dominants, Jakobson's dominant is in
fact plural clearly there are many dominants, and different dominants may
be distinguished depending upon the level, scope, and focus of the
analysis. Furthermore, one and the same text will, we can infer, yield
different dominants depending upon what aspect of it we are analyzing in
short, different dominants emerge depending upon which questions we ask of
the text, and the position from which we can interrogate it." [6]
"Many of the most insightful and interesting treatments of postmodernist
poetics have taken the form of more or less heterogeneous catalogues of
features they also beg important questions, such as the question of why
these particular features should cluster in this particular way - in other
words, the question of what system might underlie the catalogue - and the
question of how in the course of literary history one system has given way
to another. These questions cannot be answered without the intervention of
something like a concept of a dominant."
"typically organised in terms of opposition with features of modernist
poetics."
And these oppositions are what according to David Lodge?
1. Contradiction
2. Disconuity
3. Randomness
4. Excess
5. Short circuit
("by which postmodernist writing seeks to avoid having to choose either of
the poles of metaphoric (modernist) or metonymic (antimodernist) writing"
[7]
And how does Ibn Hassan relate post-modernism to modernism?
Ibn Hassan provides seven modernist rubrics indicating how postmodernist
aesthetics modifies or extends each of them.
1. Urbanism
2. Technology
3. Dehumanization
4. Primitivism
5. Eroticism
6. Antinomianism
7. Experimentalism
What oppositions does Peter Wollen propose?
1. Narrative Transitivity vs. Intransitivity
2. Identification vs. Foregrounding
3. Single vs. Multiple
4. Closure vs. Aperture
5. Pleasure vs. Unpleasure
6. Fiction vs. Reality
7. Classic Hollywood vs. Godard's counter-cinema
("writing of cinema and without actually using either of the two terms
"modernist" and "postmodernist")
What does Douw Fokkema outline as Postmodernism's conventions?
1. Inclusiveness
2. Deliberate Indiscriminateness
3. Nonselection or Quasi-nonselection
4. Logical Impossibility
And how does Douw Fokkem outline these compositional and syntactical
conventions for modernism?
1. Textual indefiniteness or incompleteness.
2. Epistemological doubt
3. Metalingual skepticism
4. Respect for the idiosyncrasies of the reader
And how does he outline the semantical conventions for modernism?
They are all organized around issues of :
1. Epistemological doubt
2. Metalingual skepticism
But the categories of Post-Modernism seem all piece-meal an unintegrated!
These are just features. But how does the whole of postmodernism stand up
in contrast with modernism?
By the change of the dominant.
How did this change of system, occur?
To desribe the change of the dominant is to describe the process of
literary-historical change.
Ok. This sounds interesting. So What is the dominant of modernism and the
dominant of postmodernism?
The dominant for modernism epistemelogical.
What do you mean by epistemological questions?
1. How can I interpret this world of which I am part?
2. And what am I in it?
3. What is there to be known?
4. Who knows it?
5. How do they know it?
6. To what degree of certainty?
7. How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another?
8. With what degree of reliability?
9. What are the limits of knowledge?
What is the epistemological genre par excellance? And could you give some
examples?
The detective story is the modernist genre par execellance.
For example:-
1. Faulkner's Absalom Absalom!
2. Forster's A Passage to India.
3. Conrad
4. Henry James
In all there are witnesses of different degrees of reliability trying to
solve and reconstruct a "crime".
· Accessibilty and circulation of knowledge.
· Different structuring imposed on the 'same' knowledge by different
minds.
· "unknowability" or the limits of knowledge.
· Multiplication and juxtaposition of perspectives
· Focalisation of all evidence through a single "center of consciousness"
· Virtuoso variants on interior monologue.
· Dislocated chronology
· With-held or indirectly-presented information
· Simulating for the reader the same problems.
Ok. Ok. Suppose I accept that modernism has an epistemological dominant.
What would be the dominant for Post-Modernism?
Ontology.
The dominant of post-modernism is ontological.
Hmm. What do you mean. What kind of questions would such a dominant be
asking?
1. Which world is this?
2. What is to be done in it?
3. Which of my selves is to do it?
4. What is a world?
5. What kinds of worlds are there?
6. How are they constituted?
7. How do they differ?
8. What happens when different worlds are placed in confrontation?
9. What happens when boundaries between worlds are violated?
10. What is the mode of existence of a text?
11. What is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?
12. How is a projected world structured?
And this relates to the features listed above?
Yes. It explains the selection and clustering of the particular features.
The ontological dominant provides a way of systemising the post-modernist
features listed above.
And how did the change from modernity to post-modernity occur?
· "intractable epistemological becomes at a certain point ontological
plurality or instability by the same token, push ontological questions
far enough and they tip over into epistemological questions." [11]
But surely if one is asking epistemological questions one is also ipso
facto asking ontological ones?
Yes. But one of the set of questions is always backgrounded. One set of
questions has to be asked before the other. This is what the dominant
effects. In a modernist text the epistemological questions are more
urgent, and the ontological questions are backgrounded - whilst in a
postmodernist text the ontological questions are more urgent and the
epistemological questions are backgrounded.
Can you give examples of some writers who began with modernist novels and
then later became postmodern authors?
· Samuel Beckett
· Alain Robbe-Grillet
· Carlos Fuentes
· Vladimir Nabokov
· Robert Coover
· Thomas Pynchon
This is Brian Mchales construction of the referent of postmodernism.
Anyone have a problem with that?
Sweetie Pie
ro...@swlink.net
<sh...@pob.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>
>
>This is Brian Mchales construction of the referent of postmodernism.
>Anyone have a problem with that?
Yea, I do. Jesus Fucking Christ! What the hell?
I read the post-modernism FAQ and the definitions of post-modernism.
I could understand what the writer of that FAQ was saying and
describing as post-modernism.
Because the person who wrote it wrote it from a desire and perspective
for everyone to understand.
And from those definitions I can quite clearly see the reasons behind
calling Pomo Decks Pomo Decks. Did you read that FAQ?
If so what is your opinion on those definitions
ilan pillemer
> >
> >
> >This is Brian Mchales construction of the referent of postmodernism.
> >Anyone have a problem with that?
>
>
> I read the post-modernism FAQ and the definitions of post-modernism.
> I could understand what the writer of that FAQ was saying and
> describing as post-modernism.
>
> Because the person who wrote it wrote it from a desire and perspective
> for everyone to understand.
>
> And from those definitions I can quite clearly see the reasons behind
> calling Pomo Decks Pomo Decks. Did you read that FAQ?
Not yet. What's the www page again?
>
> If so what is your opinion on those definitions
Well I will repeat my argument.
But try and keep it as simple and lucid as possible.
I think any so-called deck that is created, without incorporating the
knowledge or ideas of tarot is not tarot.
Whether this done by a modernist, a romantic, a post-modernist.
Each so called tarot-deck painter, would then be approaching the same
system of knowledge from a different point-of-view. But what is vital is
that they are looking at the a specific system. Not making up a different
system. The system under question is tarot.
Thus a post-modernist deck would incorporate the history of the
development of tarot. Recognising its contradictions. For
example... Locating where Waite and Crowley are not analagous (but
presenting both - presenting the contradiction as part and parcel of the
historical development of tarot.)
It would essentially describe its own creation; its own develoment. And
MOST IMPORTANTLY recognising its own historicity. By doing this it would
be caught in the post-modern effect of the "short circuit".
What do I mean by this "short-circuit"?
I turn again to Brian Mchale.
Mise-en-abyme, whenever it occurs, disturbs the orderly hierarchy of
ontological levels (world within worlds), in effect short-circuiting the
ontological structure, and thus foregrounding it a hemorrhage of
modernist poetics.
Thus a tarot deck that as part of its design included a recognition of
its historicity - would be using the structure of mise-en-abyme - and thus
would be forgrounding ontology.
Thus once you have a grasp of post-modernism; think about how these ideas
effect the way a body of knowledge is seen.
What has been going under the name of PoMo tarot here - may very be well
be an expression of post-modernism - but it has not been an expression of
post-modernism upon occult tarot.
A Post-modernist tarot deck would be just that.
Sweetie Pie
>
>
>
>
edeejay
ilan pillemer wrote: >
> Robin wrote: > >
> > And from those definitions I can quite clearly see the reasons behind
> > calling Pomo Decks Pomo Decks. Did you read that FAQ?
> Not yet. What's the www page again?
The alt.postmodern faq can be found at:
http://www.netmeg.net/faq/people/philosophy/postmodernism/
edeejay
--
"...the first step towards wisdom is to understand what is false; the
second, to ascertain what is true."
---Lactantius, "The Divine Institutes"
ilan pillemer
> Yea, I do. Jesus Fucking Christ! What the hell?
In the same way that Greer has a problem with Karlin?
>
> I read the post-modernism FAQ and the definitions of post-modernism.
> I could understand what the writer of that FAQ was saying and
> describing as post-modernism.
I can understand what Greer says is tarot.
>
> Because the person who wrote it wrote it from a desire and perspective
> for everyone to understand.
Perhaps. I have not read it yet. But I am skeptical.
By that virtue I assume you think one should not read Waite or Crowley?
>
> And from those definitions I can quite clearly see the reasons behind
> calling Pomo Decks Pomo Decks. Did you read that FAQ?
Sure and from Greer's definitions I can quite clearly see the reasons
behind calling those decks Tarot decks. Have you read Greer?
>
> If so what is your opinion on those definitions
Havent read it yet. Busy looking at scholarly writing.
Sweetie Pie
>
>
>
>
ro...@swlink.net
<sh...@pob.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>>
>> Yea, I do. Jesus Fucking Christ! What the hell?
>
>In the same way that Greer has a problem with Karlin?
No, In the way of I didn't have a clue as to what you said
>
>>
>> I read the post-modernism FAQ and the definitions of post-modernism.
>> I could understand what the writer of that FAQ was saying and
>> describing as post-modernism.
>
>I can understand what Greer says is tarot.
>
>>
>> Because the person who wrote it wrote it from a desire and perspective
>> for everyone to understand.
>
>Perhaps. I have not read it yet. But I am skeptical.
>
>By that virtue I assume you think one should not read Waite or Crowley?
Why would you say that?
I think we are having a misunderstanding. As I wrote in another post,
it's not a question of agree or not, but of I don't understand. But
as I said I am trying to understand.
ro...@swlink.net
<sh...@pob.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>
>>
>> Because the person who wrote it wrote it from a desire and perspective
>> for everyone to understand.
>
>Perhaps. I have not read it yet. But I am skeptical.
>
>By that virtue I assume you think one should not read Waite or Crowley?
Let me add, if Waite and Uncle Al were writing on this newsgroup I
would also say to them...What the Fuck!!! I don't understand, could
you explain it so I could try and understand it.
Please!!!!
Then they can decide if they are willing to do that or not.
ilan pillemer
>
> No, In the way of I didn't have a clue as to whatyou said
Yeah. I misunderstood you the first time I read this post. Re-read it and
realised that.
> I think we are having a misunderstanding. As I wrote in another post,
> it's not a question of agree or not, but of I don't understand. But
> as I said I am trying to understand.
WE had a misunderstanding.
No longer.
Sometimes I misread stuff.
Little me
>
>
>
>
>
>
J. Karlin
> Let me add, if Waite and Uncle Al were writing on this newsgroup---
I doubt either would sink so low as that, do you?
(jk)
**********************************************
Read the alt.tarot FAQ:
http://lonestar.texas.net/~r3winter/tarotfaq.html
More tarot resources available at:
http://lonestar.texas.net/~r3winter/alttarotqa.html
**********************************************
ro...@swlink.net
wrote:
>ro...@swlink.net wrote:
>
>> Let me add, if Waite and Uncle Al were writing on this newsgroup---
>
>I doubt either would sink so low as that, do you?
Uncle Al would, Waite would be a lurker
G. Leake
in depth. Besides the tricky/elusive definitions of the word vis a vis
literature, there's also another sort of aesthetic altogether in
architecture. And if one is to accept Brian Williams' Pomo deck as the
model for Pomo Tarot, then here we have yet another definition.
*course historically what people on this newsgroup refer to as Pomo decks
is something altogether different and might be better labelled as New Age.
In article
<Pine.BSI.3.96-heb-2.07.10...@pob.huji.ac.il>, ilan
pillemer <sh...@pob.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> Here is a short (not soooooo many words) precis of Brian Mchale's attempt
> to provide a way of systemising postmodernism into a graspable category.
>
>
> "one thing is certain: the referent of "postmodernism,", the thing to
> which the term claims to refer, does not exist=85 [P]ostmodernism, the
> thing, does not exist precisely in the way that "the Renaissance" or
> "romanticism" do not exist. There is no postmodernism "out there" in the
> world any more than there ever was a Renaissance or a romaticism "out
> there". They are all literary-historical fictions, discursive artifacts
> constructed either by contemporary readers and writers or retrospectively
> by literary historians=85 we can discriminate among constructions of
> postmodernism=85 all of them are finally fictions." [4]
>
> So what criteria to be used to discriminate?
>
> 1. The criterion of self-consistency and internal coherence.
> 2. The criterion of scope.
> 3. The criterion of productiveness i.e. produces new insights, new or
> richer connections, coherence of a different degree or kind, ultimately
> more discourse, in the form of follow-up research, new interpretations,
> criticisms and refinements, of the construct itself, counter-proposals,
> refutations, polemics.
> 4. Criterion of interest. [4]
>
> So how does this construct understand its referent?
>
> "a poetics which is the successor of, or possibly a reaction against, the
> poetics of early twentieth-century modernism"
>
> "historical consequence rather than temporal posteriority."
>
> "If we can construct an argument about how the posterior phenomenon
> emerges from its predecessor - about, in other words, historical
> consequentiality." [5]
>
> So how does it argue this "consequentiality"?
>
> "[W]e need a tool for describing how one set of literary forms emerge from
> a historically prior set of forms. That tool can be found in the Russian
> formalist concept of the dominant."
>
> "Despite his claim about the monolithic character of literary history
> organized in terms of a series of dominants, Jakobson's dominant is in
> fact plural=85 clearly there are many dominants, and different dominants ma=
> y
> be distinguished depending upon the level, scope, and focus of the
> analysis. Furthermore, one and the same text will, we can infer, yield
> different dominants depending upon what aspect of it we are analyzing=85 in
> short, different dominants emerge depending upon which questions we ask of
> the text, and the position from which we can interrogate it." [6]
>
> "Many of the most insightful and interesting treatments of postmodernist
> poetics have taken the form of more or less heterogeneous catalogues of
> features=85 they also beg important questions, such as the question of why
> these particular features should cluster in this particular way - in other
> words, the question of what system might underlie the catalogue - and the
> question of how in the course of literary history one system has given way
> to another. These questions cannot be answered without the intervention of
> something like a concept of a dominant."
>
> "typically organised in terms of opposition with features of modernist
> poetics."
>
> And these oppositions are what according to David Lodge?
>
> 1. Contradiction
> 2. Disconuity=20
> 3. Randomness
> 4. Excess
> 5. Short circuit
>
> ("by which postmodernist writing seeks to avoid having to choose either of
> the poles of metaphoric (modernist) or metonymic (antimodernist) writing"
> [7]
>
> And how does Ibn Hassan relate post-modernism to modernism?=20
>
> Ibn Hassan provides seven modernist rubrics=85 indicating how postmodernist
> Ok. This sounds interesting. So=85 What is the dominant of modernism and th=
> e
> dominant of postmodernism?
>
> The dominant for modernism epistemelogical.
>
> What do you mean by epistemological questions?
>
> 1. How can I interpret this world of which I am part?
> 2. And what am I in it?
> 3. What is there to be known?
> 4. Who knows it?
> 5. How do they know it?
> 6. To what degree of certainty?
> 7. How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another?
> 8. With what degree of reliability?
> 9. What are the limits of knowledge?
>
> What is the epistemological genre par excellance? And could you give some
> examples?
>
> The detective story is the modernist genre par execellance.
>
> For example:-
>
> 1. Faulkner's Absalom Absalom!
> 2. Forster's A Passage to India.
> 3. Conrad
> 4. Henry James
>
> In all there are witnesses of different degrees of reliability trying to
> solve and reconstruct a "crime".
>
> =B7 Accessibilty and circulation of knowledge.
> =B7 Different structuring imposed on the 'same' knowledge by different
> minds.
> =B7 "unknowability" or the limits of knowledge.
> =B7 Multiplication and juxtaposition of perspectives
> =B7 Focalisation of all evidence through a single "center of consciousness"
> =B7 Virtuoso variants on interior monologue.
> =B7 Dislocated chronology
> =B7 With-held or indirectly-presented information
> =B7 Simulating for the reader the same problems.
>
> Ok. Ok. Suppose I accept that modernism has an epistemological dominant.
> What would be the dominant for Post-Modernism?
>
> Ontology.
>
> The dominant of post-modernism is ontological.
>
> Hmm. What do you mean. What kind of questions would such a dominant be
> asking?
>
> 1. Which world is this?
> 2. What is to be done in it?
> 3. Which of my selves is to do it?
> 4. What is a world?
> 5. What kinds of worlds are there?
> 6. How are they constituted?
> 7. How do they differ?
> 8. What happens when different worlds are placed in confrontation?
> 9. What happens when boundaries between worlds are violated?
> 10. What is the mode of existence of a text?
> 11. What is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?
> 12. How is a projected world structured?
>
> And this relates to the features listed above?
>
> Yes. It explains the selection and clustering of the particular features.
> The ontological dominant provides a way of systemising the post-modernist
> features listed above.
>
> And how did the change from modernity to post-modernity occur?
>
> =B7 "intractable epistemological becomes at a certain point ontological
> plurality or instability=85 by the same token, push ontological questions
> far enough and they tip over into epistemological questions." [11]
>
> But surely if one is asking epistemological questions one is also ipso
> facto asking ontological ones?
>
> Yes. But one of the set of questions is always backgrounded. One set of
> questions has to be asked before the other. This is what the dominant
> effects. In a modernist text the epistemological questions are more
> urgent, and the ontological questions are backgrounded - whilst in a
> postmodernist text the ontological questions are more urgent and the
> epistemological questions are backgrounded.
>
> Can you give examples of some writers who began with modernist novels and
> then later became postmodern authors?
>
> =B7 Samuel Beckett
> =B7 Alain Robbe-Grillet
> =B7 Carlos Fuentes
> =B7 Vladimir Nabokov
> =B7 Robert Coover
> =B7 Thomas Pynchon
G. Leake
> I think any so-called deck that is created, without incorporating the
> knowledge or ideas of tarot is not tarot.
"tarot" that you refer to here. With such a statement, subjectivity and
personal perspective still is primary. This can lead anyone to reject
anything that doesn't fit within their own parameters.