Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English

Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen, José María Yebra-Pertusa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429516788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English offers a constructive dialogue on the concept of the transmodern, focusing on the works by very different contemporary authors from all over the world, such as: Chimanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Sebastian Barry, A. S. Byatt, Tabish Khair, David Mitchell, Alice Munroe, Harry Parker, Caryl Phillips, Richard Rodriguez, Alan Spence, Tim Winton and Kenneth White. The volume offers a thorough questioning of the concept of the transmodern, as well as an informed insight into the future formal and thematic development of literatures in English.

Part I
Transmodernity

A Paradigm Shift

1 The Crossroads of Transmodernity¹

Rosa María Rodríguez Magda
Translated by Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen²

What Do We Call Transmodernity?

The paradigm that allows us to think our present.

What Is a Paradigm?

A paradigm is an all-encompassing story about reality that draws the map not only of what we consider true, but thinkable, sayable.

Beyond it lies the monstrous, the forbidden, that which delegitimizes whomever dares to walk along it. A paradigm represents a relatively stable snapshot of the signifiers that, momentarily, acquire meaning, between the not-yet significant and the no-longer-significant, and although it is characterized by a constant inner dynamism, the concepts that build the episteme of an age undergo a process of sclerotization which will determine the accepted criteria for evidence, the emotional adhesion, and the horizon of the desirable.

We cannot think beyond our episteme without making a great effort, but neither can we think, make ourselves conscious, of our episteme without this great effort, since we perceive it as reality itself. The task of philosophy, of narrative, of art, is to show these internal contradictions within what is considered to be a given Weltanschauung. To foreground the points of rupture, to perceive the anguish of their misalignments, to perpetrate flights from a gear that tries to obliterate, define, and condition us.

Nowadays, in the same period, we find narratives of the celebration and narratives of the limit. The first type will reiterate an accepted topic, will complete the nuances of the dominant discourse until making it hegemonic, even when using elements previously considered as transgressive or innovative. Their aim is the panegyric, and, whether we realize it or not, the epitaph. The second type struggles to think what has not been conceptualized yet, to say what still has no name; they tear away their old armour in order to explore, bare-skinned, a landscape still unknown. We must take up this challenge if we are not to be born posthumous. For this purpose, we must develop firstly a descriptive and then a transgressive endeavour.

What Are the Most Recent Paradigms?

Modernity and Postmodernity have been the latest two cultural paradigms.

Modernity

By Modernity we understand the diverse stories, not always temporally coexistent, that have fed the collective imagination, prolonging and completing themselves until well halfway through the 20th century, with a phase of rupture in their last stage: literary-artistic avant-gardes, relativistic physics, quantum mechanics, scientific developments, the hecatomb of WWII, the crisis of moral conscience in the Holocaust, and the geopolitical restructuring of postcolonialism.

We can glimpse several Grand Narratives that have shaped Modernity:

1. The philosophical account that stems from the Cartesian cogito and brings about the emancipation of reason from theocentric tutelage—which later materialized into the so-called Enlightenment model—and articulates into the axes of: the Individual, Freedom, Justice, and Progress.
2. The sociological account that establishes the social pact as the principle of legitimacy of power and the advance of the model of political representation as the foundation of democracy that would give way to such disparate trends as liberalism or Marxism.
3. The scientific account based on Newtonian physics, experimentation, and technological progress.
4. The account of progress propelled by the industrial revolution.
5. To these should be added as a—not always valued—fundamental historical trigger: the discovery of America, of the New World, as it gives the Europeans a first sense of global consciousness and will characterize the colonial configuration of later centuries.

Postmodernity

Postmodernity, the philosophical-artistic-literary trend that emerged in the 1980s, confirms the decline of all those Grand Narratives and will propose micro-practices against their totalizing drive. The linguistic and poststructuralist turn will substitute languages for reality; perspective for truth; hermeneutics for criticism; weak thinking for strong theory; pastiche for innovation… . Social movements will be replaced by a certain individualist hedonism, while at the same time the Western canon will be attacked from the quarters of peripheral, local, subaltern knowledge. ‘Post-’ will be the prefix used to demarcate new discourses: postcolonial, postfeminism, posthumanism, postpolitics, post-truth…

But today, we must be aware of the fact that Postmodernity—with its festive, rupturist, hedonistic discourse—represents a past age. It is true that it helped us break up with a certain modern naïvety based on Grand Narratives with concepts such as truth, progress, history, subject, unity, science, reason … and showed us their fissures. But this is no longer the period of ‘post-’.

Several authors have shown their awareness of this, by looking for names that reflect our present: hypermodernity, liquid modernity, late modernity… . In all of them we can see the perception of a paradigm shift.

Transmodernity

Transmodernity is the awareness that the ‘post-’ rupture was indeed an illusion; that although the Grand Narratives resulting from the effort of Theory were shown to be set and, to some extent, that they were false stories, we were on the point of being enveloped by another dialectic of totalization: the Great Fact of Globalization. This has been facilitated by the internationalization of the financial economy, global geopolitics, and the new communication technologies. Our current reality is both transnational and virtual.

From a gnoseological perspective we are in the era of the post-truth, in the overcoming of referential theory—where the signifier fails to find its meaning in the objective referent. Frege already showed us that between the signifier and the referent there lies the sense. That sense obtained by structuralism, not through reference to objects or to the external material world, but through the play of signifiers itself. This absence of the referent has progressively developed into a semantic idealism, a hyperrealism, a void, that, with the hegemony of the virtual, has completed a phenomenology of absence. We live among simulacra. The theory of knowledge increasingly becomes a simulorgy,³ a discipline that seeks to describe how the simulacra that we endow with effects of truth are generated; how the great concepts operate as empty signifiers to which we performatively ascribe contents, variables, hopeful or demagogic misunderstandings. And, by accepting the interweaving of power and knowledge, a conscious critique emerges that must reveal how these simulacral networks conceal or reveal certain strategies of power. This is what I have called simulocracy.⁴

Transmodernity is a period of transformation, transience, and of accelerated time. But the paradox of acceleration is instantaneity, the perpetual ‘now’. The primacy of novelty generates inflationary information; we are always connected, always alert, we must react without a rest. This excess obliterates paused meditation, it only makes adhesion or rejection possible: I like it, I do not like it. Even the items of news transmitted through the media show that they are not directed to reasoning but to emotion, so that they become more and more harangues or calls to lynching. The sense of self ceases to dwell in our interior to become obscene exposure: to be is to be seen. Hence the success of Facebook; and the maximum degree of accomplishment will be to become celebrities, to participate in contests or in reality shows.

Everything circulates fast: it transforms itself. The prefix ‘trans-’ denotes dynamism, but also confusion, because it mixes planes, accumulates them, hybridizes them, turning short-term memory into our vital memory as a whole. Not only the past is photography, but also the present, which is ipso facto cornered in the obsolete. We flee from ourselves in order to construct ourselves. While for centuries the self was at the bottom of our consciousness and required a process of interiorization, now it is constructed precisely through a process of exteriorization.

The Ambiguity of the Term

You will find circulating various meanings of the term ‘Transmodernity’. The fact of having been the first to conceptualize it does not extend my right, beyond authorship, to that of establishing its legitimate interpretation, since concepts are launched, so that they can be used, distorted, or denied. But I wish, at least, for my part, not to be misunderstood.

I have not tried to disqualify Modernity because I considered it imperialistic or ethnocentric; I do not equate Modernity with colonialism, and, in this sense, I do not understand Transmodernity as a new revolutionary or happy phase, that, by including the forgotten others, would complete an all-encompassing global vision; because, at the bottom of that utopia, I perceive the paradox of the fact that Transmodernity is trying to construct the space of denunciation with the same conceptual apparatus that it intends to criticize: a European culture allegedly stained by genocide; a European culture certainly born from this perspective, yes, but also configuring the episteme in which we find ourselves, since, in the postcolonial and indigenist rejections, I perceive identitarian withdrawals that are more in line with premodern positions than with the overcoming of Modernity itself.

All cultures that have been denied, made invisible, or subalternized have the right and the duty to denounce the lies of a pretended universal Modernity, and to undertake the arduous way of reconstructing their identity out of the hybridization in which they have developed. But any attempt to return to the origins entails a melancholy loop; we invent what should have been; we revitalize traditions that in no way fit the freedom we want. Subaltern peoples, minorities, and also women were denied, heterodesigned; and they all have grown in that cruel paradox of building their being within the imposed discourse, building their identity from the perspective of the gaze of that other who had the power to name them, to regulate them, and to make them invisible. What we discover when we try to recover our own origins is a past of submission, in which the submitted was born in the wicker of that same submission. The genuine does not exist. That is why attempting to cross out history, to rewrite it, can only be done from what that story has been—however painful it may be to us. Yes, we can reinvent our past, but it will be a fiction; all we can do is denounce, carry out a systematic criticism of what was claimed to be universal but which was in fact only the perspective of the lords, of land masters, of the bodies, of the unlawfully upholders of power.

There is a whole immense task of recovering the repressed knowledge, the oral traditions, the memory of those customs that we no longer consider legitimate when applied to the present. It is necessary to recover the voices that did not manage to enter the canon, to challenge the criteria of that canon if necessary; but everything that marginalization aborted is not waiting concealed for its emergence. What could, what should have been, simply did not take place. And those of us who have not held a hegemonic position throughout history must abide by this. Our land of conquest is not the past, but the future.

It is the realization of these facts that prevents us from speaking of a Utopian Transmodernity capable of granting us a comprehensive, non-imperial view of history. Morally, we should call this legitimate yearning differently. The pending task is still formidable. And we cannot call ‘Transmodernity’ to the project of a philosophy of liberation—at least as long as it cannot merge with the Modernity as it perhaps should have been. Modernity has been what it has been, so it is also a naïve voluntarism to call Transmodernity that well-meant but empty dialogue of civilizations, created for the approval and justification of the civil servants in international organizations. And it would also be inaccurate to call Islamic culture ‘Transmodern’, as, since it left the Hispanic splendour of al-Ándalus, it has developed into a mixture of premodern tradition and modern technological development, bypassing the intermediate process of Modernity, with its separation of religion and the state, religion and ethics, religion and human rights—that is, bypassing that critical and emancipatory secularism that is the mark of Modernity.

Transmodernity is not the new happy Grand Narrative of a globalized world that finally achieves harmonious unification, in opposition to the old nefarious acts of blindness, plunderings, and dominations. And it is not that, because that does not exist, because the world is not like that.

I wanted to be much humbler in my endeavour. In the first place I speak from my situated voice, that of a white woman, from peripheral Europe. And I believe in the indignity of speaking for others. I cannot speak for the natives, or for black people… . I have enough good sense not to usurp their struggles, not to throw a nice term at them and pretend that everything will be solved with a little goodwill. For there are cases of rivalry, hatred, and mistrust that must be minutely thematized, until perhaps we can unmask, little by little, the fierce faces of our disagreements. For the above-mentioned reasons, and because I consider the task to be enormous, I cannot launch a term to convey the happy end of what may have just begun.

Thus, from my European position, I make an analysis of recent cultural paradigms, and I find that they no longer serve to define the present of a reality that, though thought from our parameters, has become global.

It is not, I insist, the force of the theory that offers us today a new Grand Narrative, but the Great Fact of Globalization. But our descriptive task cannot yield to the temptation of becoming a mere narrative of celebration—the festive aspect of our techno-euphoric society. We must delve deeper into the narrative of fracture, into the narrative of the limit, because the perverse process of totalization employs both evident and subtle mechanisms of exclusion: crowds that appear on the screens only as backdrop, extras of desolation whose real existence is irrelevant; the horror of their faces or their dismembered bodies feeds only the informational voracity that uses our anguish as a spur for the audience, or encourages impossible discourses of diffuse solidarity.

In that evermore-introjected hellish circle, there is a whole legion of invisible indwellers: unemployed, destitute, homeless… . Indignation which agglutinates tidal movements of rejection tends to coagulate in political parties, and which, perhaps unintentionally, sclerotize the revolt.

Everything we inherited from the modern model seems to want to explode into smithereens, firstly because of the festive Postmodern critique; today because of that new phantasm that crosses Europe in the form of the various populisms. And the fact is that the financial globalization that seeks to immerse us in the Totalizing New Grand Reality harbours in its bosom a palpable contradiction: on the one hand, it establishes totalizing networks based on the market and cyber-technology; but, on the other, it generates spaces of exclusion, in the exterior of geopolitical blocks, and within societies. The economic crisis, the situations of warfare, and the offshoring of production have promoted migratory processes that—far from fostering a happy cosmopolitanism—work first to fracture national borders, and then to reinforce them—in a desperate attempt to recover the national sovereignties that built the welfare state in the past. As a residue of the Postmodern societies of abundance, there lingers an idealistic multicultural discourse that ends up legitimizing reactive identity nuclei. Within a tolerant relativism we see the growth of fundamentalist carcinomas. And this atrocious face is also part of our Transmodernity. Like a cosmic Frankenstein, we are giving birth with it to an impossible creature: a re-sewn monster made up of premodern, modern, and Postmodern fragments. In order to fight against this, we cannot resurre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Transmodern Perspectives on Literature
• Part I Transmodernity: A Paradigm Shift
• Part II Transmodern Ethics
• Part III Transnational Identities and Spaces
• Part IV Transmodern Poetics of the (Spiritual) Self
• Part V Transcultural Femininities
• Part VI Conclusion
• Index