POST-Modern Literature (Conti)

Lecture 27History of English LiteratureCOMSATS Virtual Campus

Islamabad

Introduction

• Post-modernism proclaims multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies. It promotes the politics of difference! Identity is not unitary or essential, it is fluid and shifting, fed by multiple sources and taking multiple forms (there is no such thing as ‘woman’ or ‘black’).’

• The debate about contemporary society being “post-industrial,” “post-modern,” “post-structuralist,” “post-colonial,” “pluralistic,” “multi-cultural,” “fragmented,” etc., goes on, with selected pieces of literature used for illustration. The fact of the matter is that the theoretical discussion of the subject has been self-generative, proliferating all over the space, pushing literature to the periphery, leaving not much space for actual human narratives in the privileged domain.

• As such, it has not proved of much help to the historian of literature who would much rather record the literary happenings than discuss literary theories (unless, of course, the latter has been an integral part of the former). Until the time of the Modernists like Pound and Eliot, literary theory came from the leading literary writers. During the Post-modern period, however, it has come from the non-literary thinkers. Hence the problem of its meaningful application to literary works.

• One quickly turns to Frederic Jameson, who seems to have aptly articulated the reader’s dilemma about “post-modernism”:I occasionally get just as tired of the slogan ‘post-modern’ as anyone else, but when I am tempted to regret my complicity with it, to deplore its misuses and its notoriety, and to conclude with some reluctance that it raises more problems than it solves, I find myself pausing to wonder whether any other concept can dramatize the issues in quite so effective and economical fashion.

• In the absence of a more useful concept, therefore, as also because now the concept of post-modernism has come to stay, we have no choice but to go on with it, leaving the problems it has raised to time for whatever solution will become possible tomorrow. But we must know at the same time how and why the term ‘postmodernism’ has come about and what it has accumulated around itself as a description of certain distinctive characteristics of the post-War period, which is still going on.

• The growth of post-modernism, in the words of Charles Jencks, a major theorist of architecture and the originator of the term, has been “a sinuous, even tortuous, path. Twisting to the left and then to the right, branching down the middle, it resembles the natural form of a spreading root, or a meandering river that divides, changes course, doubles back on itself and takes off in a new direction.” (What is Post-Modernism? London: Academy Editions, 1986, p.2).

• We may cite and examine any number of definitions (out of the innumerable available to us), post-modernism proves slippery like a snake whose twists and twirls are impossible to pin down. From the very inception of the term in Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1947), the term has accumulated a lot of meanings many of which are mutually contradictory. How then do we go about understanding the term, making sense of all that it has accumulated? As Tim Woods has rightly observed:

• The prefix ‘post’ suggests that any post-modernism is inextricably bound up with modernism, either as a replacement of modernism or as chronologically after modernism. Indeed with post-modernism, post-feminism, post-colonialism and post-industrialism, that ‘post’ can be seen to suggest a critical engagement with modernism, rather than claiming the end of modernism to survive, or it can be seen that modernism has been overturned, superseded or replaced.

• The relationship is something more akin to a continuous engagement, which implies that post-modernism needs modernism to survive, so that they exist in something more like a host-parasite relationship. Therefore, it is quite crucial to realize that any definition of post-modernism will depend upon one’s prior definition of modernism. (Beginning post-modernism.Manchester University Press, 1999, p.6)

INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Extensive and varied debates about postmodernism in philosophy and cultural theory notwithstanding, we can concentrate upon the key theorists whose ideas have shaped these debates about the philosophical effects and theoretical impact of the movement after modernism. The philosopher who is said to have put the first post-modern cat among the modernist pigeons was Jean-Francois Lyotard, whoseThe Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) occupies a special place among a set of books which launched an attack on modernity.

• His argument is for a rejection of the search for logically consistent, self-evidently “true” grounds for philosophical discourse. He is suspicious of all claims to proof or truth. As he puts it, “Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power,” (Postmodern Condition, p.46).

• In his considered view, beneath the facade of objectivity there always is a hidden and dominant discourse of realpolitik: “The exercise of terror” (p.64). Thus, any kind of legitimation is nothing but an issue of power. He believes that there is a connection, an intimate one, between power and the rhetoric of truth or value.

• Lyotard identifies “an equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth,” and contends that it continually remains a question of: “No money, no proof—and that means no verification of statements and no truth. The games of scientific language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right” (Postmodern Condition, p.45).

• He also demonstrates how utilatarianism is predominant in institutions:The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer ‘Is it true?’ but ‘What use is it?’ In the context of the mercantilization of knowledge, more often than not this question is equivalent to: ‘Is it saleable?’And in the context of power-growth: ‘Is it efficient?’... What no longer makes the grade is competence as defined by other criteria true/false, just/unjust, etc. (Postmodern Condition, p.51).

• From these ideas Lyotard develops a narrative of the difference between modernist and postmodernist aesthetics which does not conform to an historical period. In his argument, Modernism is:an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace or pleasure....

• The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which denies itself the solace of good forms...that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.

Summary

• Thus, to sum up Lyotard’s view of Postmodernism, it is, first of all, a distrust of all metanarratives; it is also anti-foundational. Secondly, when it presents the unpresentable, it does not do so with a sense of nostalgia, nor does it offer any solace in doing so. Thirdly, it does not seek to present reality but to invent illusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented. Fourthly, it actively seeks heterogeneity, pluralism, and constant innovation. Lastly, it challenges the legitimation of positivist science.

Jean Baudrillard

• Next to Lyotard, the founder of Postmodernism, comes Jean Baudrillard, another French intellectual who can be called the high priest of Postmodernism. According to Baudrillard, postmodernity is also characterized by “simulations” and new forms of technology of communication. His argument is that whereas earlier cultures depended on either face-to-face communication or, later, print, contemporary culture is dominated by images from the electronic mass media.

• Our lives today are increasingly being shaped by simulated events and opportunities on television, computer shopping at “virtual stores,” etc. Simulation is in which the images or ‘manufactured’ reality become more real than the real. In his view, the demarcation between simulation and reality implodes; and along with this collapse of distinction between image and reality, the very experience of the real world is lost.

• Hyper-reality, according to Baudrillard, is the state where distinctions between objects and their representations are dissolved. In that case, we are left with only simulacra. Media messages are prime examples that illustrate this phenomenon. In these messages, self-referential signs lose contact with the things they signify, leaving us witness to an unprecedented destruction of meaning.

• Advertisements present manipulated images to float a dream world only to trap the viewer for the sale of consumer goods. The manipulated simulation, manufacturing motivated reality, ignores or overlooks the harsh or unpleasant aspects associated with an image—say New York or New Delhi.

Summary

• Consequently, the images of sparkle and light casually erase the urgent socio-economic problems. His conclusion is that TV is the principal embodiment of these aesthetic transformations, where the implosion of meaning and the media result in “the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV” (Simulations, New York, 1983, p.55). Baudrillard was the one who contributed to the Guardian of 11 January, 1991, the well-known article “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.”

Jacquis Derrida

• Perhaps the most influential person among the Postmodernist intellectuals has been Jacquis Derrida, who remains the principal theorist of Deconstruction. The publication of the three of his books in 1967, namely Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, and Of Speech and Phenomena, laid the foundation of the theory of Deconstruction.

• Derrida’s views can be summarised as under:He insists that all Western philosophies and theories of knowledge, of language and its uses, of culture, are LOGOCENTRIC. What he means is that they are centred or grounded on a “logo” (which in Greek signified both “word” and “rationality.”). Using a phrase from Heidegger, he says that they rely on “the metaphysics of presence.”

• According to him, these philosophies and theories are logocentric in part because they are PHONOCENTRIC; that they, in other words, grant, implicitly or explicitly, logical “priority”, or “privilege”, to speech over writing as the model for analysing all discourse.

• Derrida’s explanation for “logo” or “presence” is that it is an “ultimate referent”, a self-certifying and self-sufficient ground, or foundation, which is available to us totally outside the play of language itself. In other words, it is directly present to our awareness and serves to “centre” (that is to anchor, organise and guarantee) the structure of the linguistic system.

• Derrida questions these philosophies and shows how untenable these premises are. His alternative conception is that the play of linguistic meanings is “undecidable” in terms derived from Saussure’s view that in a sign-system (which is language), both the “signifiers” and the “signifides” owe their seeming identities, not to their own inherent or “positive” features, but to their differences from other speech sounds, written marks, or conceptual significations.

• Derrida’s most influential concept has been that of DIFFERANCE.

• Any utterance, therefore, oral or written, can be subjected to any number of interpretations, depending upon the reader’s ability to “play” with the various possible meanings each word is capable of yielding. This view of language and meaning has had great impact on both literary criticism as well as literary writing. Postmodernist texts as well as interpretations decentre and subvert the conventional or settled meanings and values of any given story or situation, concept or construction, system or structure.

• Some of Derrida’s sceptical procedures have been quite influential in deconstructive literary criticism as well as in feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist creative compositions. One of these is to subvert the innumerable binary oppositions—such as man/woman, soul/body, right/wrong, white/black, culture/nature, etc.—which are essential structural elements in logocentric language.

• In Derrida’s view, as he shows, there is a tacit hierarchy implied in these binaries, in which the term that comes first is privileged and superior, while the one that comes second is derivative and inferior. What Derrida does is to invert the hierarchy, by showing that the secondary term can be made out to be derivitative from, or a special case of the primary term. He does not, however, stop at that; rather, he goes on to destablise both hierarchies, leaving them in a state of undecidability.

• Derrida had not thought of Deconstruction as a mode of literary criticism. He had only suggested a way of reading all kinds of utterances so as to reveal and subvert the presuppositions of Western Metaphysics. But more than any other discipline of knowledge it is literary criticism which has adopted his theory of Deconstruction as a critical tool of literary analysis. His most ardent followers have, however, been in America, not in England.

• The most influential of these has been Paul de Man whose Allegories of Reading (1979) was the earliest application of Derrida’s concepts and procedures. Then came Barbara Johnson, a student of de Man, whose work, The Critical Difference (1980), carried the task of appropriating Derrida to literary criticism still further. Later, J. Hillis Miller, once a leading American critic of the Geneva School, converted to Deconstruction and contributed to the theory’s practical application his Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (1982), The Linguistic Movement: From Wordsworth to Stevens (1985), and Theory Then and Now (199l).

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