"The Postmodern"

The article is (broadly) about the relationship between two types of narrative: that of the nation and that of the postmodern. I will also be arguing BTW that Lyotard is neither a postmodern thinker nor in favour of postmodernism. I'm not sure if this is a controversial or an obvious point.

(= this is what i think: ProPoMo = NoPoMo = too lazy-dumm-korrupt to to do the actual reading/thinking)

it possibly has limited technical use in the world of architecture, of which i know nothing: lyotard says that use has no connection w.what he's talking about

Other people in 1925: 'Oh, no that was just a flash in the pan in Bloomsbury and Montmartre in December 1910.'

More people, joining in: 'Thank god. Back to reality, then. Are you going to the Ideal Home exhibition?'

come to think of it I hear people using this word far less often than I did just say 4-5 years ago. maybe that's just a side effect of being an undergraduate at the time, though.

(and I wonder if alex is still around to see it this time)

(it begins "This title stands here only in order to indicate one remaining division of the system, which future workers must complete. I content myself with casting a cursory glance, from a purely transcendental point of view, namely, that of the nature of pure reason, on the works of those who have laboured in this field—a glance which reveals [many stately] structures, but in ruins only." It's only three pages long. Hegel squatted this chapter)

(ie kant said "also there's this, but i am only going to sketch it from THIS pov, others must pursue...") (= intuition his pov wasn';t sufficient)

It's contentious enough, I suppose, on the level of individual art forms, but who ever motivates the idea of 'modernity' as a concept that captures something significant? it occurs to me that I generally can only go by the word of theorists who have come before me. but if I look at our culture and society right at this moment, or even in the last ten years, the idea of an overarching concept to get at the essence of life in these times sounds crazy. and not for any kind of 'postmodern' reasons. so even though the idea that there was a definite difference from earlier times felt, at some point in history, is often easily assented to, I have a hard time feeling that the 'moderns' would have thought it made any more sense to do that kind of thing.

which unfortunately makes me think, oh, what about 'the enlightenment', and even if 'the enlightenment' didn't have the kind of ontological status its members hoped, it certainly seems to be viable in some cultural sense (i.e. self-conception of some of a culture). so then why not agree to the same thing for 'modernity' and 'post-modernity'?

(if I had a better sense that I could treat theorizing about the character of an age on a cultural level as I know how to on the artistic level - as a critical tool of instrumental value for understanding artworks that are hard to understand another way - then I might feel more comfortable with it. but part of how I think I can do that is by keeping close to individual artworks and criticisms of them, then maybe up to styles. because I'm ignorant I don't have the same sense of being able to do that on the cultural level.)

There were a vast number of articles and books written like this - that is, apparently synthesised solely out of references to other books or articles, without any additional or independent comment or contribution. Since all of these, without exception, were overtly postmodern texts, I began to see the postmodern method as being akin to the activities of the bower bird.

After a while I began to think that the essence of postmodernism was psychological decoy through scholastic one-upmanship. No wonder it still survives in academia - and nowhere else.

This is not unconnected with the interest in the immediately pre-romantic period in Foucault's Order of Things; Habermas's Transformation of the Public Sphere and Derrida's Of Grammatology. All of them, to some extent, might be said to be interested in disentangling the genealogy of modernity (although each is suspicious of the concept of modernity to a different extent, Habermas notably less so than the others) by looking back towards the historical and intellectual origins of the concept. Lyotard follows this trend, but unlike the others he appears to validate the postmodern -- except that, even in The Postmodern Condition (to which important qualifications are made in The Differend), the idea of postmodernity is always used within inverted commas as it were -- it is a story that other people (American sociologists and theorists of architecture mostly) have told about the world, with which Lyotard is engaged, but to which he does not entirely subscribe.

Or to take an aesthetic example: is there such a thing as a postmodern novel? If so, why do so many features of the 'postmodern' novel appear in the eighteenth-century and early nineteenth century novel? 'Postmodern'is generally used to mean the novels that try to get beyond 'modernism', which is an attempt to get beyond 'realism'. But from this narrowly historicist understanding of literary history, earlier works with 'postmodern' features are bound to look anachronistic (and so Tristram Shandy, say, becomes an exceptional C18th novel rather than a typical one). But the mistake is to assume that 'realism' is the defining feature of the 'traditional' novel: rather than one of the competing world-views set to work in the novel. Once we forget this idea, we can see that the novel has always been 'postmodern' (interesting in playing off different ways of understanding the world, intertextual etc.) but obviously the term 'postmodern' then becomes effectively meaningless, since it just means 'novel-like'. Some confusion stems from the attempt by historicist critics to link the discourses of 'postmodernity' to 'postmodernism' i.e. because they assume the world is different today than it was in the C18th, they also assume that 'art' should somehow also be different: their narrative construction of history subtends and undermines both their historical and aesthetic views.

looking specifically at postmodernism as it features in visual art discourse, is maybe the invocation of 'greenbergian flattening' itself a flattening of multiple modernisms and strands of modernist thought, not so easily compressed under the weight of one man's theories? again pointing to a historical THEN to explain the NOW, even while the 'now' doesn't claim to put much stock in 'nows' and 'thens'?

here is a chunk of text that i've had sitting in my 'message' box about 5 posts ago that i may want to not post after i've read over yr post carefully, but anyway here goes:

if we're saying that the worst thing about postmodernism is its putting other, vaguer, self-circling, maybe even *wrong* things in place of *thinking*, then aren't we suspiciously eager to dismiss large amounts of 'postmodern thought' because of the appearance of the word 'postmodern' or the use of certain critical strategies that seem to make thinking harder? mark's "if no two informed users can agree on the def. of 'post-modern' then in what way is it a useful word?" (taken from some other thread i don't have time right now to find ha) seems very un-markian in some respects, a shrugged-shoulders "how can i think about you, you haven't allowed me to!?"

alex's example of a 'scottish identity' standing to potentially benefit from a (intrinsically flawed?) cultural conception of the postmodern is v interesting to me, and seems to connect w josh's idea of postmodernity as viable as a popular cultural definition, in a way that forces us to engage with its concepts - to approve pomo's authorship? - as a means of getting int it or out of it or around it. am i talking out me arse?

Po-mo vs Futurism vs Modernism

(looking for this I found any number of other threads over which i could trace how my attitudes changed. the degree to which i liked eagleton way back when makes me a bit chagrined.)

also: AREN'T we different from the C18? just not necc in the ways that postmodernism would assume?

Me too.

But there are things in PoMo art that seem substantially different, in important and interesting and fruitful ways, from either Modernism as a movement (or a collection of movements, I think) or more broadly from simply what had gone before. Among these, arising out of the thinking about there being all kinds of different ways of viewing the world, and that maybe there wasn't a right one, and that a particular viewpoint had been dominant for a long time, was the opening up of territories for differing angles on the world. Feminist art is an important one here, but we can all produce a list. This seems to me to be inextricably linked with the most usual account of what Postmodernism is, the rejection of privileged metanarratives, the reaction to modernism's alleged failure to establish a new and complete humanist account of the world.

I'd also claim that there are substantial differences in what is called Postmodern literature from what went before. It's much more than a rejection of realism (which I see more as a historical anomaly, a little dirt road that somehow convinced people (and still does!) that it was the main highway). It's also different from the pre-realist novel, much as it has many significant things in common with several notable examples of same. One of the ways is described by and embodied in what is maybe a paradigmatic PoMo story, Borges' 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', but I think there are lots of things in Borges (and in Barth, Calvino, Coover, Gaddis, Perec) that are not conceivable in any 17th/18th Century fiction.

I guess what I say above is not an argument for Postmodernism as a valuable cultural account (though there is some truth in it there - can we really contest the claim that irony has become vastly more prevalent in recent decades, for better or worse?), let alone as a serious philosophical standpoint, and more like a description of something like an artistic mode. I think there are important and interesting characteristics in common among the PoMo artists and writers, but how much that amounts to beyond some kind of familial similarity is another matter.

(i.e. as far as a response to realism, how much was actually a response to "social realism" and the stalin school? i.e. on a crude level its well documented that in the art realm abstract expresionism was a CIA plot. [they funded it to stamp out the wave of pro-soviet social realist art sweeping europe as a result of the post-wwii re-alignment])

related q for alex: being shamefully ignorant of scotland, when did this shift from pomo back to pre-pomo national discussion take place?

I guess I've adopted the Jameson line that modernism-->postmodernism is not a shift in aesthetics per se so much as a shift of the contextual position of the aesthetic world within capitalist society. Postmodernism = the world where the battle between pre-modern and modernising forces has been all-but won by the latter. Because the shift is one of context (ie. the increasing efficiency of late capitalism in commodifying all production, aesthetic and otherwise)rather than text, the shift from modern to postmodern tendencies within aesthetic works themselves is a just a tendency rather than a hard'n'fast rule. That at any rate is what I've been led to assume.

Postmodernism as the suspension of a search for one valid account of the world, and openness to the possibility of multiple narratives? I think there's a historical objection to this, and a quasi-logical one. There's a convincing case to be made for reading C18th fiction as similar kinds of negotiation to the one you describe. Take Smollett's _Humphrey Clinker_ for example -- an epistolary novel in which each character writes not only in a different voice, but in a different genre: repeatedly dramatising conflicting interpretations of the same events and objects. When Bramble and his nephew travel to the Highlands: Matthew sees it in the language of the relatively new discipline of political economy; Jery reads it in the older but newly fashionable discourse of the aesthetics of the sublime. His sister Lydia exists throughout within the conventions and language of a sentimental romance. (Etc... but you get the idea). We *can* resolve these conflicts if we like by appealing to some extra-textual guarantor, but the book itself doesn't do this.

I think the idea that there was somehow a more naive earlier time is not only over-played in the idea of postmodernism, but is itself logically incoherent, since by instituting postmodernism as an improvement on traditional or modern ways of seeing the world ('finally we've learnt to stop searching for the ultimate answer!') we are drawing on modes of thinking which we're claiming to have got beyond: for example a metanarrative of some kind of enlightenment or liberation from illusion (whether personal or collective) which forms the bed-rock of many people's accounts of 'the modern'. This obviously leads to a paradox, which po-mo authors are only to happy to develop for themselves, that the answer = there is no answer, which is still an answer.

When distinguishing between the postmodern and the 'traditional' novel we'd have to ask what is the difference that makes the difference? My feeling is that any possible answer that can be given to that question can only be based on assumptions that form part of non-postmodern ways of thinking / writing because all our concepts of aesthetics, history, culture, the subject etc. are still 'modern'. But obviously, since what I'm discounting includes the security with which we can safely distinguish 'the modern' itself from anything else, 'modern' is not a concept I'm particularly comfortable with either.

It's not really incoherent. Surely a postmodern can attribute to earlier times naivety in thinking that the future will be a progression towards the better, in all aspects BUT ONE! I'm saying that your incoherency is similar to the criticism that altruism is an incoherent concept because it is it's own reward.

is that Humphrey Clinker book a good read?