Close Encounter with Postmodernism of the First Kind. 1

In literary and cultural circles, it is rare that one doesn't hear or over-hear buzz words in the receptions or opening ceremonies of some picture galleries,theatres, museums, exhibition or concert halls etc. from some egg-heads or young and wish-they-were still-young ladies displaying what they would dearly love to project as a "cultured look" in hushed whispers or involuntary or sometimes affected "giggles" between coffees, beers or wines amidst the flowers, posters and photographs. One such buzzwords one is most likely to encounter is the word "post-modern/postmodernist" or its corresponding noun form "post-modernism". What is postmodernism? I decided to find out. What better way than to start at the beginning. So recently I bought a tiny paperback with a green, blue, black and white cover, whose title gives me the impression that it will contain just what I need most:"Beginning Postmodernism". It was published in 1999 and is written by one Tim Woods. Last night, I opened it and glanced at its "Introduction: the naming of the parts". 

It began with the heading "What is/are/was/were postmodernism(s)?" Woods quotes David Antin who, in his "Modernism and Postmodernism" (72) says, " From the modernism you choose you get the postmodernism you deserve".  He is probably right for Woods says, " Books proliferate on the subject; newspaper journalists write articles on the phenomenon; it is bandied about on radio; few self-respecting English departments ignore it". Knowledge of its etymological origin is used by a magazine as a measure of "hipness". "The term gets everywhere, but no one can quite explain what it is...Is it a concept or a practice, a matter of local style, or a whole new period or economic phase? What are its forms, effects and place? How are we to recognize its advent? Are we truly beyond the modern, truly in (say) a postindustrial age?"  These are some of the questions Woods promises to clarify for us.

Woods gets confirmation of his view that the term "postmodernism" is ubiquitous and yet highly contradictory from a fellow writer Dick Hebdige who wrote in Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things (88) that" It becomes more and more difficult as the 1980s wear on to specify exactly what it is that 'postmodernism' is supposed to refer to as the term gets stretched in all all directions across different debates, different disciplines and discursive boundaries, as different factions seek to make it their own, using it to designate a plethora of incommensurable objects, tendencies, emergencies.". Hebdige lists the following contexts in which the term has been used: the decor of a room, the design of a building, the diagesis of a film the construction of a record or a "scratch" video, a TV commercial or an arts documentar or the "inter-textual" relationships between them,  the layout of a page in a fashion magazine pr critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, an attack on the "metaphysics of presence", a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a postwar generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle age, the "predicament" of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination with images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political and existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the "implosion of meaning", the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad social and economic shifts into a "media", consumer or multi-national phase, a sense of "placelessness" or the abandonment of placelessness (critical regionalism) or even a generalized substitution of spatial for temporal co-ordinates etc.

There are now specialist academic journals dedicated to postmodernism e.g. Sub-Stance, Diacritics, Enclitic and there is an on-line website Postmodern Culture (http://muse.jhu,edu/journals/postmodern-culture), Ctheory (http://www. ctheory.com) etc.  Woods says that the term has become " a rather vague, nebulous, portmanteau word for everything that is more modern than the modern.....the origins of postmodernism appear to be completely confused and underdetermined...since postmodernism denies the idea of knowable origins. Postmodernism has acquired a semantic instability or a shifting meaning that shadows and echoes its notes of indeterminacy and insecurity." 

With such diversity of contexts, with such denial of authority and such in principle plurality, it is not surprising that debates abound. Such debates have raged for years in such fields as architecture, visual art, literature and cultural theory. Woods says he intends his book to compare the different or comparable uses of the term in different disciplines and analyze its impact on different areas of knowledge, its specialized terminology and its inter-relationship with different subjects, to introduce its significant figures, terminologies, developments, key works and events in the "history" of the term, its important debates and important areas of contemporary cultural production and an annotated bibliography for new students so that the reader may probe for himself the "mystique" that surrounds the concept and its use. 

Charles Jencks, a theorist in architecture, says in his book What is Postmodernism (86) that  the path of growth of the term has been " sinuous, even tortuous...Twisting to the right, branching down the middle, it resembles the natural form of a spreading root or a meandering river that divides, change course, doubles back on itself and takes off in a new direction." . Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, two important philosophic cultural theorists, compares such a development as a "rhizome" because the lateral root structures of the relevant social and cultural activities in the so-called postmodern era are dispersed, divergent and a-centred systems or structures and not organized, hierarchical as in the modernist era. It is imitative, parodic, ironic and self-reflexive at the same time and difficult to pin down.

Woods suggests sensibly that to understand "postmodernism", we must first understand what is "modernism". He says that the word "post" suggests " a critical engagement with modernism" or alternatively that modernism has been overturned, superceded or replaced. Their relationship is closer in his view to that of a continuous critical engagement like that between a host and its parasite. Geographically modernism has had great influence in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Rome, London, New York and Zurich and culturally, has been influential in architecture, music, visual art, philosophy and literature involving such names as T. S Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Stephen Mallarmé, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Tristan Tzara in literature, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Weber, Igor Stravinsky, Charles Ives and Benjamin Britten in music, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picassor, Wassily Kandisnky in art and also in such movements as Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism, Constructivism and Imagism.

What then is modernism? To Woods, "modernism" can non-exhaustively be characterized by the following 6 features:

1. Finding  new forms to explore how we see the world rather than what we see in it (in literature, a stream of consciousness in narration in novels; in visual art,  representing objects as a series of discontinuous, fractured planes, equidistant fom the viewer instead of perspectival representation suggesting pictorial depth and containing three-dimensional objects,  as in cubism; in msuic, the abandonment of harmony in favor of tonal color)

2. In architecture, using basic geometric shapes like cubes and cylinders in the tower blocks to express a rationalist and progressive society.

3. Fragmentation and fragmented forms like collage and structures in art and deliberately discontinuous narratives in literature susgest the break-up of former accepted systems of thoughts and belief.

4. Self-reflexivity in esthetics in which artefacts explore their own constitution, construction and shape e.g narrators comment on narrative form or painting in which the image is left unfinished with "roughed in"or blank sections in the canvas.

5. A clear distinction between popular and elite forms of culture (e.g intellectual distinctions between atonal electronic music like those of Stockhausen and modern jazz or between modern jazz and rock and between rock and pop.

6. A gradual growth of interest in non-Western forms of culture as a way to reinvigorate tired traditional esthetics e.g interest of Picasso and Braque in Japanese prints and "primitive" African masks.