A Poetics of Postmodernism
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
5. Secondary
Readings
Linda
Hutcheon. A
Poetics of Postmodernism.
Key Terms (tags): postmodernism,
Supporting References:
- Buchanan, Ian. "postmodernism." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. : Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. Date Accessed 2 Sep. 2013
“postmodernism. A highly contested term
used to signify a critical distance from modernism.
Since it first came to prominence in the mid 1970s, it has given rise
to a vast body of literature in virtually every discipline in the
humanities and social sciences. Broadly speaking, though, it has been
used in three main ways: (i) to name the present historical period;
(ii) to name a specific style in art and architecture; (iii) to name
a point of rupture or disjuncture in epistemology (for this reason it
is often, mistakenly, equated with poststructuralism
and deconstruction).
Attempts have been made to standardize usage so that when the
historical period is intended the term ‘postmodernity’ is used,
whereas if it is the aesthetic dimension that is at issue the term
‘postmodernism’ is used, with the term ‘postmodern’ being
reserved for epistemological references. Pedagogically useful as this
standardization of terminology is, the uptake of it is very far from
universal.
“In The
Origins of Postmodernity (1998), Perry Anderson traces the first
appearance of the notion of postmodernism to the work of the literary
critic Frederico de Onís, who used the word ‘postmodernismo’ (in
a foreword to a collection of contemporary Hispanophone poetry he
edited in 1934) to describe what he saw as a short-lived reactionary
reflux within modernism itself (i.e. precisely the opposite meaning
to the one it would subsequently attain). Although it gained
widespread usage in Spanish and Portuguese criticism, both in Europe
and Latin America, it didn't pass into the Anglophone world until
1954, when the great English historian Arnold Toynbee used it in an
essentially negative way in the eighth volume of his A Study of
History to name the period beginning with the Franco-Prussian
War (1870–1). However, Toynbee's deployment of the term didn't
catch on. It was, rather, the contemporaneous usage of the
term—initially only in private correspondence—by the ‘Black
Mountain Poets’ Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, who were the
first to use it in a sense consistent with how the term is understood
today, that was to prove influential.
“Olson and
Creeley used the term ‘post-modern’ to describe both a shift in
history and a specific poetic project they developed in relation to
that shift. But neither poet produced a durable doctrine and the term
fell into disuse again, only to be picked up a few years later at the
dawn of the 1960s by two scions of the New York Left, C. Wright Mills
and Irving Howe. If in the hands of Olson and Creeley the term
postmodern had acquired a certain affirmative meaning, Mills and Howe
quickly restored its pejorative sense: they mobilized the term to
describe a general slackening of commitment to the political ideals
embodied in the notions of communism and socialism. At the end of the
1960s, its meaning was once more reversed by the literary critic
Leslie Fiedler who used it in a CIA-sponsored conference to celebrate
the emergence of a new ‘youth-culture’ sensibility prioritizing
personal expression and civil rights over work and the needs of the
state. To this point, the use of the term postmodern was sporadic and
inconsistent, functioning more as a suggestive adjective than a
viable concept. But that soon changed.
“In 1971,
Egyptian-born literary and cultural critic Ihab Hassan produced a
vast survey of works (across all the arts, but focused particularly
on literature and music) that in his view could no longer be
described as modern because their organizing impetus was radically
different from modernism, and had therefore to be labelled
postmodern. Interestingly, his key exhibits of this new style were
John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Buckminster Fuller, all names
associated with Black Mountain College. Hassan argued that these
artists (together with the likes of Ashberry, Barth, Barthelme,
Pynchon, and Warhol) were anarchic in spirit and inclined towards
playful indeterminacy rather than the Olympian aloofness which he
associated with modernism. Although willing to see the postmodern as
a form of ‘epistemic break’ (a term he adapted from Michel
*Foucault) akin to other forms of the
Avant-garde,
such as Dadaism
and Surrealism,
he refused to see it as a historic break and pulled back from making
any connection between the new art form and changes in society. Thus,
for Hassan postmodernism was essentially a passing fad in the history
of the arts and it was soon overtaken by what he called
post-postmodernism.
“It took the
architectural historian Charles Jencks to connect the dots and link
the artistic Avant-garde with social change and contrive a vision of
the postmodern that would finally capture the attention of the
mainstream. Somewhat gnomically, Jencks pronounced that the previous
era came to an end at precisely 3.32pm on July 15, 1972, with the
demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe social housing project in St Louis,
designed by the architect responsible for the twin towers of the
World Trade Centre in New York, Minoru Yamasaki (this coincidence has
not gone unremarked and there are those who suggest that it is the
destruction of the latter that actually marks the true advent of
postmodernity). Jencks reasoned that the destruction of these
buildings marked the end of the idea (largely associated with utopian
architects like Le Corbusier) that social change could be effected
through architecture and more generally the end of the idea that it
is government's role to attempt to effect social change. It also
signalled the acceptance of the idea that the global market is the
true arbiter of the social. Jencks saw in this gesture a refreshing
willingness to break with the past and it was this aspect of
postmodernism that his writing emphasized. But he also hoped that the
proliferation of new styles which this changed attitude to tradition
enabled would give rise to a kind of polyphonic
harmony of differences.
“Now widely used
in architectural and artistic circles, the term postmodern was still
seen as referring primarily to a new style or fashion in the
aesthetic realm and was regarded by many (including those like Hassan
who initially touted the term) as suspiciously modish. The next
statement of the term would deepen its penetration considerably and
apply it to the realm of knowledge itself thus giving the term the
intellectual respectability it had hitherto lacked. Commissioned by
the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec,
Jean-François
*Lyotard's La Condition postmoderne:
rapport sur le savoir (1979), translated as The Postmodern
Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984) transformed
postmodernism into a concept to be reckoned with, and initiated a
two-decade long debate about its existence. Lyotard famously defined
the postmodern as incredulity towards what he called grand
narratives. By this he meant (i) the idea that
revolution was inevitable and that it would bring with it beneficial
social change; and (ii) the Enlightenment
ideal that progress in social terms would be achieved through
technological advancement. The credibility of these grand narratives
was destroyed by World War II, which revealed the hollowness of
both—revolution gave rise to Stalinism and the Enlightenment gave
rise to Nazism (here Lyotard's argument extends several key tenets of
Frankfurt School thinker Theodor
*Adorno's work).
“The destruction
of the grand narratives saw the spawning of a multiplicity of ‘little
narratives’ or what Lyotard more commonly referred to as language
games (a notion he adapted from Ludwig
Wittgenstein).
Incommensurable with one another, these language games could neither
be subsumed by an overarching or totalizing concept such as
contradiction
nor integrated by processes like Jürgen
*Habermas's notion of consensus or Niklas
Luhmann's systems theory. Lyotard is careful to acknowledge that not
all social relations are of this type, but he nonetheless insists
that language games are the minimum form of social relation. The
resulting image of society, which Lyotard terms ‘realism’, is
that of an agonistics or even a polemics in which each language game
must compete for legitimacy. Unable to appeal to pre-existing grand
narratives for its legitimacy, knowledge now makes do by citing its
efficiency and its practicality. It has to be said that Lyotard
paints a grim portrait of the university system dominated by economic
rationalism, which is only very partially offset by the faith he has
in Avant-garde art to keep alive thoughts of the future by, as he
puts it, ‘waging war on totality’. Although Lyotard speaks of
postmodernism as a historical condition and links the state of
knowledge corresponding to that condition to the kinds of social
changes theorized by Daniel
*Bell and others as the emergence of a
post-industrial
society, he doesn't name the cause of the
change. A decade later British Marxist geographer David
*Harvey would give a much more thorough answer
to this problem in his The Condition of Postmodernity
(1989).
“The first critic
to provide an economic answer to the problem Lyotard raised was
however Marxist cultural critic Fredric
*Jameson. Jameson's work on postmodernism was
developed in instalments over a period of more than 20 years. One can
read traces of it in Marxism and Form (1971) and The
Political Unconscious (1981), though in these instances he used
the terms consumer
society, post-industrial
society, and society
of the spectacle. He first used the term
postmodernism in a talk entitled ‘Postmodernism and Consumer
Society’ given at the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art in the
autumn of 1982. A fuller version of the essay was subsequently
published in New Left Review in the spring of 1984 under the
new title of ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism’. This essay has been enormously influential and for
many it offers the definitive, but by no means infallible, definition
of postmodernism. Jameson builds on Ernest Mandel's argument in Der
Spätkapitalismus (1972), translated as Late Capitalism
(1975), that contemporary capitalism is an intensification of trends
in global economics detected by Marx, rather than proof that Marx was
wrong (as Daniel Bell and others had argued). Rejecting any
suggestion that capitalism has somehow come to an end, radically
changed, or worse attained its apotheosis, Jameson's thesis is that
postmodern culture is the superstructural
expression of late
capitalism (meaning simply the current state of
the mode
of production), which for Jameson means a
global situation of economic, military, and political dominance by
the US.
“Jameson readily
acknowledges that postmodern texts are recognizably different from
modern texts, but in contrast to a lot of critics he is unwilling to
accept that the symptomatic features of postmodernism are purely
textual in origin. Culture, for Jameson, cannot be dissociated from
the economic and political situation in which it must make its way
because the traditional Marxist
distinction between them (i.e. the
base/superstructure
model) has in fact collapsed. Postmodernism,
Jameson argues, is the ‘cultural revolution’ needed to enable
contemporary society to adjust and respond to these changes. His
catalogue of five symptoms of postmodernism—the waning
of affect, pastiche,
hysterical
sublime, geopolitical
aesthetic, and a mutation in built space that
has discombobulated our global cognitive
map—have to be read against this background.
“For many,
however, Jameson's account of postmodernism is too ‘totalizing’
(which certain careless critics have equated with ‘totalitarianism’,
though in reality it means nothing more sinister than trying to
account for the historical situation as a whole) and there remains a
strong counter-current which resists his comprehensive overview in
favour of a highly localized aesthetic and/or epistemological
definition. Canadian literary critic, Linda Hutcheon, is probably the
leading exponent of the purely aesthetic definition of postmodernism,
while the late American philosopher Richard
*Rorty was probably the principal authority on
the epistemological version of postmodernism.”
- Brydon, Diana. "Hutcheon, Linda." The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. : Oxford University Press, 1997. Oxford Reference. 2006. Date Accessed 19 Aug. 2013
“Hutcheon, Linda (b. 1947). Born Linda Bortolotti in Toronto,
Ontario, and educated at the University of Toronto (B.A., 1969;
Ph.D., 1975), and Cornell University (M.A., 1971), she taught at
McMaster University, Hamilton, from 1976 to 1988, the year she became
professor of English and comparative literatures at the University of
Toronto. Hutcheon is one of Canada's best-known and most frequently
cited literary critics as well as an influential teacher and editor.
She has popularized poststructuralist theories among the academic
community and its students, and shown their relevance to contemporary
Canadian concerns with identity, history, and community in her many
books, including Narcissistic narratives (1980), A
theory of parody: the teachings of twentieth-century art forms
(1985), A poetics of postmodernism: history, theory, fiction
(1988), The Canadian postmodern: a study of contemporary
English-Canadian fiction (1988), The politics of
postmodernism (1989), Splitting images: Canadian ironies
(1991), and Irony's edge: the theory and politics of irony
(1995). They have influenced the field of postmodern theory, cultural
studies, and Canadian literary and cultural studies as they are
practised in Canada and elsewhere. Hutcheon's clear stye and breadth
of reference across various fields of cultural representation
(notably architecture, literature, painting, and opera) provide a
synthesizing overview of culture as a system governed by
representation conventions that rivals Northrop Frye's.
Unlike Frye, however, Hutcheon increasingly brought formalist
readings into contact with political questions, particularly those
involved in the representation of history, gender, and race. Each of
her books contributes a new angle to what is now emerging as the
governing goal of her work: the anatomization and investigation of
complicitous critique. From her earliest work on what she calls
‘narcissistic narrative’ to later considerations of postmodern
aesthetics, parody, and irony, Hutcheon has wrestled with her desire
to celebrate self-reflexivity in contemporary art as a liberating
strategy even as she recognized the limitations of such stance.
“With her husband Michael Hutcheon,
Linda Hutcheon has also written Opera: desire, disease, death
(1996), an entertaining discussion of some famous operas in the
contexts of the subtitle. She edited Double-talking: essays on
verbal and visual ironies in Canadian contemporary art and
literature (1992) and co-edited (with Marion Richmond) the
anthology Other solitudes: Canadian multicultural fictions
(1990), stories and interviews; (with Mark A. Cheetham) Remembering
postmodernism: trends in recent Canadian art (1991); and (with
George Bowering)
Likely stories: a postmodern sampler (1992).”
- a
- a
- a
Comments