Ideas on post-modernism

In the previous week’s column we observed how Jameson distinguished the increasingly blurring boundaries between high culture and post-modernist cultural goods and its links to consumerism. An important observation that Fredric Jameson made was that ‘‘theoretical discourse’ should also be considered among the ‘manifestations of post-modernism’.

What is obvious is that one may be able to identify ‘post-modern trends’ by observing the diverse ‘manifestations of post-modernism’. Jameson seems to be of the view that it symbolises ‘the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order’.

He observes, “…What is often euphorically called modernisation, post-industrial or consumer society, the society of the media, the spectacle or multinational capitalism. This new moment of capitalism can be dated from the post-war boom in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s or, in France from the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958. The 1960s are in many ways the key transitional period, a period in which the new international order (neo-colonialism, the Green Revolution, computerisation and electronic information) is at one and the same time set in place and swept and shaken by its own internal contradictions and external resistance.”

Fredric Jameson

One of the significant ways in which the new post-modernism expresses the ‘truth’ of the new order as described by Jameson, are ‘Pastiche and schizophrenia’. He states, “One of the significant features or practices in post-modernism today is pastiche. Both pastiche and parody involve the imitation or, better still, mimicry of other styles and particularly of mannerisms and stylistic switches of other styles. It is obvious that modern literature in general offers a very rich field for parody, since the great modern writers have all been defined by the invention or production of rather unique styles.

Now, parody capitalises on the uniqueness of these styles and seizes on their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities to produce an imitation which mocks the original. I won’t say that satirical impulse is conscious in all forms of parody; in any case, a good or great parodist has to have some secret sympathy for the original, just as the great mimic has to have the capacity to put himself/herself in the place of the person imitated. So there remains somewhere behind all parody the feeling that there is a linguistic norm in contrast to which the styles of the great modernists can be mocked.

Linguistic norm

But what would happen if one no longer believed in the existence of normal language, of ordinary speech, of the linguistic norm (the kind of clarity and power that Orwell celebrated in his famous essay Politics and English Language, say’) ?. ” In a way, what Jameson highlights is the aspect of post-modernism which challenges the fundamental norms of modernity. He observes, “One could think in this way: perhaps the immense fragmentation and privatisation of modern literature –its explosion into a host of distinct private styles and mannerisms- foreshadow deeper and more general tendencies in social life as a whole.

Supposing that modern arts and modernism- far from being a kind of specialised aesthetic curiosity-actually anticipated social development along these lines; supposing that in the decades since the emergence of great modern styles society had itself begun to fragment in this way, each group coming to speak a curious private language of its own, each profession developing its private code or dialect and finally each individual coming to be a kind of linguistic island , separated from everyone else?

But then in that case, the very possibility of any linguistic norm in terms of which one could ridicule private languages and idiosyncratic styles would vanish, and we would have nothing but stylistic diversity and heterogeneity.

Pastiche

That is the moment at which pastiche appears and parody has become impossible. Pastiche, like parody is the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without the laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared with which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humour: pastiche is to parody what that curious thing, the modern practice of a kind of blank irony, is what Wayne Booth calls the stable and comic ironies of eighteenth century’

Following a lengthy description on post-modern architecture, particularly, urban build space, Fredric Jameson, characteristically questions the very notion of post-modernism as; “Now, I must try in conclusion, to characterise the relationship of cultural production of this kind of social life in the country today.

This will also be the moment to address the principal objection to the concepts of post-modernism of the type I have sketched here; namely that all the features we have enumerated are not new at all but abundantly characterised modernism proper or what I call high modernism. Was not Thomas Mann, after all interested in the idea of pastiche, and is not The Oxon of the Sun chapter of Ulysses its most obvious realisation? Can Flaubert, Mallarme and Gertrude Stein not be included in an account of postmodernist temporality? What is so new about all of this? Do we really need the concept of postmodernism?

One answer to this question would raise the whole issue of periodisation and of how a historian (literary or other), posits a radical break to henceforth distinct periods. I must limit myself to the suggestion that radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete change of content but rather restructuring of a certain number of elements already given: features that in an earlier period or system were subordinate now become dominant, and features that had been dominant again become secondary.

In this sense, everything we described here can be found in the earlier period and most notably within modernism proper. My point is, until the present day those things have been secondary or minor features of modernist art, marginal rather than central, and we have something new which then become the central features of cultural production.”