Supplanting the Postmodern

David Rudrum, Nicholas Stavris

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781501306884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

For more than a decade now a steadily growing chorus of voices has announced that the 'postmodern' literature, art, thought and culture of the late 20th century have come to an end. At the same time as this, the early years of the 21st century have seen a stream of critical formulations proclaiming a successor to postmodernism. Intriguing and exciting new terms such as 'remodernism', 'performatism', 'hypermodernism', 'automodernism†?, 'renewalism', 'altermodernism', 'digimodernism' and 'metamodernism' have been coined, proposed and debated as terms for what comes after the postmodern. Supplanting the Postmodern is the first anthology to collect the key writings in these debates in one place. The book is divided into two parts: the first, 'The Sense of an Ending', presents a range of positions in the debate around the demise of the postmodern; the second, 'Coming to Terms with the New', presents representative writings from the new '–isms' mentioned above. Each of the entries is prefaced by a brief introduction by the editors, in which they outline its central ideas, point out the similarities and/or differences from other positions found in the anthology, and suggest possible strengths and limitations to the insights presented in each piece.

Part One

The Sense of an Ending

1

Epilogue: The Postmodern … in Retrospect and Gone Forever, But Here To Stay: The Legacy of the Postmodern

Linda Hutcheon

In the 1980s and 1990s, Linda Hutcheon’s work on the postmodern helped to define the field, and established her in the front rank of expert commentators upon it. The following extracts, however, written in the first decade of the twenty-first century, revisit the topic of postmodernism with the benefit of hindsight. In an epilogue written for a new edition of her classic text The Politics of Postmodernism, Hutcheon penned an oft-cited turn of phrase that sums up the view from this vantage point bluntly: ‘Let’s just say: it’s over.’

Postmodernism, for Hutcheon, owed much of its success to its status as a counter-discourse. Accordingly, it forged alliances with various movements in identity politics, most notably feminism, but also postcolonialism and queer theory. But postmodernism’s very success led to its rapid institutionalization: it attained a canonical status within the structures of higher education and the culture industries that did not sit well with its rhetoric of subversiveness, and that in turn alienated its erstwhile support base in oppositional politics.

The second of Hutcheon’s texts nevertheless explores the ongoing relevance and persistence of the postmodern. While postmodernism’s failure to engage directly with political questions of agency and its preference for deconstructive scepticism over constructive debate may seem frustrating, she argues – in a classically postmodern ‘both/and’-style argument – that postmodernism nevertheless serves as a valuable and irreplaceable opening into the demystifying of contemporary culture, which furthers the critique of its politics and its representations.

As an aside, it is noteworthy that Hutcheon suggests that the new media and communications technologies of the digital age, together with the tendency towards globalization (these two not being wholly unrelated), have wrought changes that have transformed the world and the culture postmodernism sought to describe. This argument is expanded by other critics later in this section: Alan Kirby elaborates on the effect of digitalization in supplanting the postmodern, and Jeffrey T. Nealon explores the impact of globalization. Interestingly, the same ideas underpin some of the formulations explored in Part Two: automodernism and digimodernism emphasize the role of digital technologies in the outmoding of postmodernism, while altermodernism flags up the role of globalization.

The extracts are from Linda Hutcheon, ‘Epilogue: The Postmodern … in Retrospect’ in The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 165–7 and pp. 180–1; and ‘Gone Forever, But Here to Stay: The Legacy of the Postmodern’ in Postmodernism: What Moment?, ed. Pelagia Goulimari (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 16–18.

Epilogue: The Postmodern … in Retrospect

‘What was postmodernism?’

John Frow’s 1990 question is just as relevant today, in our new millennium, as it was when initially asked – in other words, just after The Politics of Postmodernism was first published. While Frow was already using the past tense, I can’t help noticing that I resolutely stayed with the present tense in writing the previous chapters – a reflection, no doubt, of my sense of excitement: the postmodern was in the process of defining itself before my very eyes (and ears). Today, our perspective is inevitably going to be different. Despite attempts to move ‘the post-modern critique forward’ (Allan 1998), to generalize it into a ‘theory of the contemporary’ (Connor 1989), or to pluralize it into the more descriptive postmodernisms (Altieri 1998), the postmodern may well be a twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of the past. Now fully institutionalized, it has its canonized texts, its anthologies, primers and readers, its dictionaries and its histories. […] We could even say it has its own publishing houses – including this one. A Postmodernism for Beginners (Appignanesi 1995) now exists; teachers’ guides proliferate. For over a decade, diagnosticians have been pronouncing on its health, if not its demise (see, for a sampling, McGowan 1991; Rose 1991; Zurbrugg 1993; Morawski 1996), with some of the major players in the debate weighing in on the negative side: for people like Terry Eagleton (1996) and Christopher Norris (1990; 1993; 1994), postmodernism is finished, passé; indeed, for them it’s a failure, an illusion.

Let’s just say: it’s over. What we have witnessed in the last ten or fifteen years and what I’d like to explore in this epilogue is not only the institutionalization of the postmodern, but its transformation into a kind of generic counter-discourse (Terdiman 1985) of the 1990s, overlapping in its ends and means (but by no means interchangeable) with feminism and postcolonialisrn, as well as with queer, race and ethnicity theory. What these various forms of identity politics share with the postmodern is a focus on difference and ex-centricity, an interest in the hybrid, the heterogeneous, and the local, and an interrogative and deconstructing mode of analysis. Each one of these, however, has had its own specific artistic and social history; each too has had a different politics, as we shall see. Postmodernism in both fiction and photography […] could be said to have been born of the particular confrontation between realist referentialism and modernist reflexivity, between the historical and the parodic, or the documentary and the intertextual. But this particular confrontation ended in a typically postmodern truce: no ‘either/or’ decision was required; the more inclusive ‘both/and’ prevailed. That very inclusivity, however, became the mark of its potentially complicitous critique and the beginning of the problems identity politics would have with the postmodern.

Since the focus of this study was on artistic practices and on the critical discourses used to analyze them – in other words, on their reception – postmodernism could not simply be treated as a matter of style: it inevitably also involved the ideology of representation, including self-representation. It was over the issue of the access to and means of self-representation that the feminists and the postmodern first met in the 1980s; it would be over this same issue that the postmodern would make the acquaintance of the postcolonial (and others) in the l990s. These fortuitous meetings worked not only to hone postmodern theory’s focus, but also to increase its reflexive awareness of its pragmatic limitations in actual interventionist arenas. Of necessity, then, the definitions offered of the postmodern have continued to proliferate, and Brian McHale’s early (1987) query – ‘whose postmodernism?’ – still has to be answered before this complex phenomenon can be addressed in any sensible way. But this is perhaps as it should be – in a decentered postmodern context. Homi Bhabha used the idea of ‘acting from the midst of identities’ (1997: 438) to describe his response to the problematic and agonistic state of hybridity that many live today because of race. But if we add creed, gender, sexual choice and class, we can see that postmodern theorists – like all others – are bound to theorize (and thus to theorize differently) from a state of multiple identities. As Edward Said has put it: ‘No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of society. These continue to bear on what he does professionally’ (1979: 10). They continue to bear on what she does too, of course.

Even if the postmodern is over today, it is likely safe to say that it has persisted nonetheless as a ‘space for debate’ (Malpas 2001: 1). This is true whether the focus is, as in this book, on postmodernism as an aesthetic phenomenon or on postmodernity as a general social condition. What studies of both of these angles of vision share is the impact of poststructuralist theory (for an extended analysis of this sharing, see Bertens 1995); in addition, everything from communications technology to multiculturalism inevitably spills over from the general culture of postmodernity into the particulars of aesthetic postmodernism. Yet, the use of the term ‘the postmodern’ blurs the distinctions between the two, and much of the work of the last decade has consciously decided to allow (or produce) that blurring. Because of a mutual focus on ‘culture’, it is admittedly hard to draw the line between discussions of postmodernism in the arts and postmodernity in social or political terms. Yet such distinctions (and their disciplinary correlates) may be worth attempting, however artificially and provisionally, in order to get a clearer sense of developments and changes in the different realms over the last 15 years.

[…]

I have never felt comfortable moving from a predetermined theoretical stance to its ‘application’ in the analysis of texts; in (perhaps perverse) reverse order, I’ve always sought to theorize from – to learn from – texts. Therefore, my interest has not been in the producer, but in the text and its reception in the world. The problem, I discovered, is that when parody is involved – as it so often is in postmodern fiction and photography – we inevitably posit intentionality in our very designation of a text as parodic: at the very least, when we call something a parody, we infer that someone intended this to be a parody of something else (see Hutcheon 1985: 84–99; 1995: 116–40). This act of interpretive inference is not, however, a retrograde act, even in a poststructuralist and textualized theoretical universe; it is simply the particular form that the readerly/viewerly hermeneutic engagement takes when parodies are brought to bear upon parodied texts. And arguably it is through understanding what is at stake in such hermeneutic activities that postmodernism as a textualized phenomenon can be seen to have worldly implications and consequences. When texts are placed together in a parodic relationship – Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for instance – it is not only their formal connections that are brought to our attention; instead, the similarities of form point to the ironized differences of both content and form. This is where the satiric power of ironic juxtaposition comes into play; this is how Rush...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Exploring this Anthology
• Part 1 The Sense of an Ending
• 1 Epilogue: The Postmodern … in Retrospect (2002) and Gone Forever, But Here To Stay: The Legacy of the Postmodern (2007)
• 2 Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust (2003)
• 3 Postmodernism Grown Old (2005)
• 4 The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond (2006)
• 5 They Might Have Been Giants (2007)
• 6 Post-Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism (2012)
• Part 2 Coming to Terms with the New
• 7 Remodernism
• The Stuckist Manifesto (1999)
• Remodernism (2000)
• 8 Performatism
• ‘Introduction’ from Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (2008)
• Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (American Beauty) (2000, revised 2008)
• 9 Hypermodernism
• Time Against Time, or The Hypermodern Society (2004, trans. 2005)
• 10 Automodernism
• Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism: Autonomy and Automation in Culture, Technology, and Education (2007)
• 11 Renewalism
• Introduction: A Wake and Renewed? (2007)
• from The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary (2010)
• 12 Altermodernism
• Altermodern Manifesto: Postmodernism is Dead (2009)
• Altermodern (2009)
• 13 Digimodernism
• from Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture (2009)
• 14 Metamodernism
• Notes on Metamodernism (2010)
• Conclusions
• 15 Note on the Supplanting of ‘Post-’
• 16 The Anxieties of the Present
• Index
• Copyright