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NOTES ON THE POSTMODERN |
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Jameson
says: 'Postmodern theory is....the effort to take the temperature of the
age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure
there is so coherent a thing as an "age", or a zeitgeist,
or "system" or "current situation" any longer.
Postmodern theory is then dialectical at least insofar as it has the wit
to seize on that very uncertainty as its first clue and to hold to its
Ariadne's thread on its way through what may not turn out to be a
labyrinth at all, but a gulag or perhaps a shopping mall.....We went out
one morning and the thermometer was gone' (Jameson, 1991, p ix).
If modernism was the age of anxiety, alienation and abstraction, it has been re-read as the post-modern jouissance of lack, absence, traces, difference, multiple-coding. Modernism equalled bourgeois liberalism, personal style, positivism, humanism, empiricism, rationalism. Modernism was also an "International Style" in architecture, with its cultural transcendence, utopianism, universal grammar, acontextuality, its oppositional voice and radical signifying practice, which was (literally) blown-up by the postmodern return to the vernacular. Modernist notions have been displaced by, or may still co-exist with: 1) the collapse of inner and outer imperialisms - collapse of mastery in all its forms; 2) the impact of feminism; 3) the impact of the ecological movement; 4) the awareness of the non-European cultures; 5) liberation theology and ecumenism; 6) the conflation of 'high' culture with 'pop' culture and mass commercialisation - commodity aesthetics; 7) new holistic science; and finally and perhaps fatally, 8) our fascination with the new electronic media. Terry Eagleton still argues for some critical perspective here. He argues for a criticism that establishes, 'an implacable distance between itself and the social order'. This is not quite the end of subjectivity. 'The subject of late capitalism is neither simply the self-regulating synthetic agent posited by classical humanist ideology, nor simply a decentred network of desire, but a contradictory amalgam of the two' (quoted in Jencks, 1991, pp114,115). The problem is of course to find a place 'outside', when there is no place left that is not colonised in advance. We can no longer speak innocently - that is outside of some ideological position. We have lost faith in a self-determining position, which according to Toynbee, in his A Study of History, is the precursor to the breakdown of civilisations. This is the point at which human beings lose control over their own destinies, which he felt, was due to some fundamental moral aberration. In a similar vein, George Steiner commented in a television programme, on what he called 'the fate of ultimate values in this century of barbarism. Without a belief in God, with words rendered meaningless by deconstruction and nihilism, neither art nor human values can survive'. Similarly, in his book Real Presences, Steiner states, 'What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable' (Steiner, 1989, p229). Coker (1995) concludes that Western societies have indeed lost that sense of historic destiny that did so much to fuel past wars. However, he suggests, far beyond the Western world history is being made at an ever faster rate, and if the West continues to question its own meanings it may end up becoming in Hegel's words 'a people without a history' - a people upon whom others make war. During the "Culture at the end of the Century" conference in Barcelona, in April 1995, the young British novelist Tibor Paul commented thus: 'If we [novelists] do retain any function as pathfinders, the message seems to be...we can't find the path'. More stridently, Stephen Vizinczey, the Hungarian born London based novelist, suggests, 'The West is taking tolerance to the point of cultural suicide. If you do not have a core culture, there can be no healthy society'. Coker, C. (1995) War and the Twentieth Century. Brassey Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso Jencks, C. (1991) The Post-Modern Reader. New York: St. Martin's Press. London: Academy Editions, 1992. Steiner, G. (1989) Real Presences. Faber and Faber 1991.
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