07 Statements About Postmodernism By Published Authors 12-16
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This article is from the Postmodern FAQ, by Van Piercy vpiercy@indiana.edu with numerous contributions by others.
07 Statements About Postmodernism By Published Authors 12-16
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(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)
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