05 Statements About Postmodernism By Published Authors 1-4
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This article is from the Postmodern FAQ, by Van Piercy vpiercy@indiana.edu with numerous contributions by others.
05 Statements About Postmodernism By Published Authors 1-4
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(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)
**
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