Introduction to Postmodernism

30-minute Lecture for Seniors Thesis Conference, 1 March 2011 Ms. Ivery de Pano, Instructor, Department of English, Ateneo de Manila University While preparing for this short lecture I did what many of you would do if you were in my shoes: I turned on my computer and went towhat do you think, Google? No, I went to OPAC to look up library books on the postmodern, and while I think I knew what to expect, I was still rather surprised by the titles that OPAC generated when I typed postmodern and clicked on search. Aside from the usual suspects like postmodern poetry, literary theory, art, sexual politics, technoculture, etc., there were also: Postmodern Interviewing Postmodern Management and Organization Theory Postmodern Ecology Postmodern Military Postmodern Platos Postmodern Marx Postmodern University Postmodern Teacher Postmodern God Buddhism and Postmodernity A Postmodern Revelation: Signs of Astrology and the Apocalypse This goes to show that perhaps more than any other critical idiom, postmodern seems to be particularly and notoriously protean, as though the term can be applied to practically anything under the sign of the contemporary. Which is to say that paradoxically, the postmodern itself has become a victim of one of its own definitions (and despite the fact that, paradoxically again, the notion of definition itself is questioned by postmodernism). This definition of the postmodern that has, so to speak, turned back on itself, is the rejection of any fixed or absolute meaning or form of thought that attempts to totalize, anything that attempts to define boundaries to make the ideas within them cohere systematically; the postmodern instead defines itself in terms of multiplicity, depthlessness, undecidability, dissemination, decentering, simulation, pastiche, and the unpresentable. (I will briefly explain these terms one by one, which is also to say that the postmodern is not as unmanageable despite its radically protean character. *proceed to explaining*) As with the case of postmodern, for its deliberate nebulousness, it has created so many definitions that many thinkers and writers may accept, reject, or just ignore, but clearly, while its obvious that we cannot do without it, and its obviously here to stay, a lot of thinkers and writers dont like the termagain, for as many reasons as there are many definitions of the postmodern. However, the nebulousness of the postmodern really has something to do with its socalled project (although, again, the term project connotes agency, something that the postmodern also radically problematizes). This project is to undermine what Jean Francois

Lyotard calls the grand narratives or those over-arching mega-explanations that culture and society has come to unproblematically accept, and it includes even those grand narratives of emancipation which, as Lyotard argues, could also be suspect and oppressive. Lyotard particularly launches his attack on the Enlightenment, which has become the unconscious bedrock of modern Western thoughtthe notion of the superiority of reason as a sort of absolute value. Postmodernists, however, will argue that reason itself as a totalizing grand narrative has been used to justify oppression, as in the rational or scientific application of Marxist ideas underlying Stalinist terror, or the rational or empiricist eugenics that served as grounds for the Jewish holocaust. In place of the grand narratives, Lyotard proposes championing the little narratives or those local, plural, fragmentary explanations that dont attempt to totalize or explain everything. This attitude of incredulity to grand narratives is the result of reason losing its legitimacy in the contemporary world because of the horrors it has created despite the good things it has led to like modernization, scientific and technological developments. This incredulity is perhaps more like a tendency, an attitude, an orientation that underscores much of the postmodern. Here I will attempt to describe this attitude in three directions, before I proceed with literary postmodernism, which is the focus of this lecture: 1. As was just discussed, we have the PHILOSOPHICAL direction, which is the rejection of realist epistemology (or the Enlightenment project); the Cartesian autonomous or self-identical subject; the transparency of language; the accessibility of the real; the possibility of universal foundation. It accepts instead: other-determination; desire; contingency; difference; absence. This philosophical orientation is also related to poststructuralism. 2. We also have the notion of the postmodern as a SOCIO-CULTURAL-ECONOMIC CONDITION, which is termed postmodernity, and described in terms of a new dispensation that has resulted from a paradox in the 1960s. It was a particularly turbulent time when ideologies were largely divided between the conservative right and the radical left, and the peculiar result of this conflict was that the right won in economic terms (capitalism irreversibly won over communism, such that the economic period of today is called global or transnational capitalism), but the left won in cultural terms (such that we have active politics of difference like multiculturalism, pluralism in gender and ethnic identities, etc.) This paradoxical outcome is the condition of postmodernity characterized by Fredric Jameson as the ever increasing insidiousness of capitalism in every imaginable area of human subjectivity. 3. The third direction is that of postmodernism as a set of artistic or literary practices characterized by either a radical self-reflexivity, or an ironic return to representationalism. It is worth noting that self-reflexivity is not exclusive to postmodernism; modernist art and literature is self-reflexive, but in postmodernism this self-reflexive feature is radicalized as a way of being incredulous to the self as

potentially originary or totalitarian. The ironic return to representationalism, on the other hand, is a response to the anti-representationalism in modern art and literature; in the postmodern, we return to representationalism but remain incredulous to it, being fully aware that representation in the past has assumed to be an unproblematic mirroring of reality, when in fact representation could disguise a distortion and present it as the truth or the real. Under literary postmodernism, I can think of three dominant types, though as Ive mentioned there are many ways of being postmodern in a text, and definitions and features are slippery and not the same in each text. 1. Theoretical fiction (coined by Mark Currie) which implies a convergence of theory and fiction, where these two formerly different fields have assimilated each others insights. It is as though a critic wants to become a literary writer to better dramatize his/her insights; or, conversely, a literary writer wants to show how aware he/she is of criticism by writing a piece of literature that critiques itself. This theoretical selfconsciousness may take the form of novels about literary critics themselves (as in David Lodges campus novels), or critical essays that perform unto itself its own critical point (and this is a feature of most poststructuralist criticism). 2. Under perhaps the label fiction and criticism we may classify what Linda Hutcheon calls historiographic metafiction, which is different from historical fiction that simply render into fiction some historical events. Historiographic metafiction mainly foregrounds an incredulity to the dominant notion of history as a transparent, factual repository of the past. For historiographic metafiction, history comes to us in the form of texts and narrative, and is necessarily shaped by itthe past may never be accessed as is, but only through these constructive, narrative, textual devices. Our access to the past is always in the form of some interpretation of the past that usually masquerades as factual. To call attention to the textualization or narrativity of history, historiographic metafiction usually distorts what has come to be accepted as normal in narrativefor example, teleological linear sequencing, coherence, championing of individual characters as agents of history. Examples of this would be Salman Rushdies Midnights Children, Martin Amiss Times Arrow that invert binary relations by telling the story backwards, and some Philippine novels that call attention to how nation is a narration, a grand narrative, novels like Eric Gamalindas Empire of Memory and Alfred Yusons The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe. 3. The third is what I would classify, following Brian McHale, as fiction that creates ontological worlds. This mode of fiction is called metafiction. The issue here is no longer epistemology, or how you know reality, but ontology, or how you construct reality. Rather than make explicit critical statements about the construction of history or other grand narratives, this type of fiction looks inwardly to critique the process of storytelling and narration not just for language play or the authors narcissistic display

of exceptional artistry, but more importantly, how reality as we know it is not realityin-itself but fictionfiction not as unreal but fiction as an imaginative construction of our own lives. In other words, fiction cannot be dissociated from reality; there is hardly a distinction between the two. Examples: a. The so-called Starbucks experience, which is really a customized, commodified, and therefore fictionalized experience. b. Mediafied polls before election time. The polls do not simplistically reflect the public choice; the polls, when publicized, affect or construct public choice itselfthus determining, rather than merely reflecting, the outcome of the elections. c. Fashion models. We all know that their glamorous photos are photoshopped, their bodies and skin are fictionalized, yet why do we still pattern our fantasies after them? d. John Barth who wrote a story with a fictionist as a protagonist. This fictionist is writing a story about a fictionist writing a story about a fictionist writing a story, and so on. This obviously raises the idea that, ultimately, it has to go around: who is the fictionist writing about John Barth as fictionist? e. Another John Barth story is a retelling of A Thousand and One Nights, but in his version Scheherazade copies her a thousand and one stories from a book in the future titled A Thousand and One Nights. The question then, is, who is the author of the stories? f. Many of Borgess stories create ontological worlds, stories like The Garden of Forking Paths, Tlon, Orbis, and The Library of Babel. g. Another example would be, and with this I will end, Italo Calvinos The Castle of Crossed Destinies which is the outcome of a personal game that obsessed Calvino. He would spread out a pack of tarot cards in a grid such that when you read the tarots horizontally, vertically, forwards and backwards, several coherent stories will be told. (See diagram <http://www.freelancerfrank.com/opinions/?p=259>.) This ontological world of The Castle of Crossed Destinies raises questions about the emptiness of meaning of each card, such that a card as an empty sign can mean almost anything depending on where you place it in the gridand the narratives criss-cross one another in the grid in a kind of pictorial intertextuality. The fact that Calvino has to force stories into the horizontal, vertical, diagonal combination of cards calls attention to the fact that in the name of coherence, we force meaning into signs and turn them into narratives. And these narratives intersect; in The Castle they of course intersect neatly in a grid, but in reality the intersections and intertextualities of narratives and meanings are not always neat and decidable and perceptible as such. To conclude perhaps with a definition of the postmodern which I would like to leave with you: the postmodern is a critical perspective that opens itself to the undecidables, the unnameables, those that grand narratives might have excluded or

rendered absent in its attempt to cohere and systematize and totalize. It is a radical openness that ironically does not discount the possibility of truth and reality, but reaffirms it; however, it is something there but not always understood in-itself because of the unavoidable filtering of narrative. So the incredulity is a loosening of various notions so as to make room for that which narrative could not, or cannot, justifiably representthe undecidable, the unnameable, which are also the subjects that much of political criticism wants discourses to open up to, to reaffirm, to re-present but in carefully reflexive ways.