Cultural scene

Early stages of post-modernism

In the previous column, we dealt with the seminal developments in the international literary landscape beyond post-modernism. In this week’s column, we examine, briefly, the rudimentary stages of postmodernism and the prominent ideas of the theorists on postmodernism.

One of the prominent literary critics, whose ideas profoundly influenced the wider range of definitions on post-modernism, is Fredric Jameson. Jamson’s ideas are of importance in understanding the early days of postmodernism in general and the ever-confronting ambiguity of its definition in particular.

Fredric Jameson

Jameson in his thesis The Cultural Turn, selected writings on postmodern in a chapter entitled “Post-modernism and Consumer Society”, observes, “The concept of post-modernism is not widely accepted or even understood today. Some of the resistance to it may come from the unfamiliarity of the works it covers, which can be found in all the arts; the poetry of John Ashbury, for instance, as well as the much simpler talk poetry that came out of the reaction against complex, ironic academic poetry in the 1960 there was reaction against modern architecture and in particular against the monumental buildings in the international style; the pop buildings and decorated sheds celebrated by Robert Venturi in his manifesto Learning from Las Vegas; Andy Warhol, pop art and more recent photorealism.

In music, the moment of John Cage but also the later synthesis of classical and popular styles found in composers like Philip Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk and new wave of rock with such groups as the Clash, the Talking Heads and the Gang of Four, in film, everything that comes out of Godard-contemporary vanguard film and video-as well as whole new style of commercial or fiction films, which has its equivalents in contemporary novels, where the works of William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and Ishmael Reed on the one hand, and the French new novel on the other, are also to be numbered among the varieties of what can be called post-modernism.

This list would seem to make two things clear at once. First, most of the post-modernism mentioned above emerge as specific reactions the established forms of high modernism against this or that dominant high modernism which conquered the university, the museum, the art gallery network and foundations.

Those formerly subversive and embattled styles-Abstract Expressionism, the great modernist poetry of Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens; the International Style (Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies Van der Rohe); Stravinsky, Joyce, Proust and Mann-felt to be scandalous or shocking by our grandparents, are, for generations which arrives at the gate in the 1960s, felt to be establishment and the enemy-dead, stifling, canonical, the reified monuments one has to destroy to do anything new.

This means that there will be as many different forms of post-modernism as a coherent thing easier, since the unity of this new impulse-if it has one-is given not in itself but in the very modernism that it seeks to displace. ”

Observations

What is obvious from Fredric Jameson’s observations that post-modernism emerged out of modernity and as specific reactions to modernity and therefore, roots of the post-modernism are deeply imbedded in modernism. One may not be able to describe post-modernism, without making inference to modernism.

One of the predominant characteristics of post-modernism that Jameson observes is that post-modernism seeks to eliminate the old boundaries between high culture and pop culture. Jameson observes, “The second feature of this list of post-modernism is the effacement of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so called mass or popular culture.

This is perhaps the most distressing development of all from an academic standpoint, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock or kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture and in transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading, listening and seeing to its initiates.

But many of the newer post-modernisms have been fascinated precisely by that whole landscape of adverting and motels, of Las Vegas strip, of the Late Show and B-Grade Hollywood films, of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories of the gothic and romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and the science fiction or the fantasy novel. They no longer ‘quote’ such ‘texts’ as a Joyce might have done, or a Mahler; they incorporate them, to the point where the line between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw. ”

Distinction

An important distinction that Jameson draws between high culture and the emerging post-modernist cultural goods is that postmodernism has intrinsically linked itself with consumerism.

He observes, “A rather difficult indication of this effacement of the older categories of genre and discourse can be found in what sometimes called contemporary theory. A generation ago, there was still a technical discourse of professional philosophy- the great system of Sartre or the phenomenologists, the work of Wittgenstein or analytical or common language philosophy-alongside which one could still distinguish that quite different discourse of the other academic disciplines- of political science, for example, or sociology or literary criticism.

Today, increasingly we have a kind of writing simply called ‘theory’ which is all or none of these things at once. This new kind of discourse, generally associated with France and so-called French theory, is becoming widespread and marks the end of philosophy as such. Is the work of Michel Foucault, for example, to be called philosophy, history, social theory or political science? It’s undecidable, as they say nowadays, and I will suggest that such ‘theoretical discourse’ is also to be numbered among the manifestations of post-modernism.”