Postface: Positions on Postmodernism

 
 
What follows is a written exchange among the editors about the contents of the first issue of Postmodern Culture. It is called a “postface” because it is meant to be read after the other items in the issue; we hope it will serve as a preface to discussion among other readers.

 

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Eyal:
 
Several of the works in this issue imply that there is a dynamic relationship between the decentered individual or event generally celebrated by postmodernity and some governing ideal, a hidden ground that operates through these texts. Kipnis, for instance, argues finally not only that the body is a text, or that intellectual history has a body, but also that there are “moments in the social body”– intellectual constructs which organize history as an idea, more than just the sum of its parts. She shows an interest in “TRANSITION,” and not just in particulars, and those transitions–which are explicitly staged in her medium–imply some organizing principle.
 
Elaine:
 
I find it provocative to consider whose bodies, and what relationships between them, are represented in these essays. For example, Kipnis’s narrative movement back and forth from Marx to his maid Helene to late twentieth century teenage girls suggests, to me at least, a feminization of Marx’s body (feminists have argued that women’s bodies are sites for masculine writing, but here, Marx’s body, like the anorectic’s, occupies the position of tablet for cultural text)

 

John:
 
I’d agree that Kipnis is making a connection between particular male bodies and particular female bodies as “tablets for cultural text,” but I’m not sure the movement between particulars amounts to the projection of a “governing ideal, a hidden ground” that Eyal sees here. It strikes me that many of these writers (Acker, English, Kipnis, even Yudice) emphasize the rude eruptions and crude particulars of the body in a way that is anything but idealizing. And while I agree with the idea that Kipnis, and others in this issue, want to see history as having a meaning, I don’t think this necessarily involves each of these authors in a commitment to an “ideal,” or to a teleology. I think that Kipnis, Ross, hooks, and others try to establish a context, rather than a ground, for the particular.
 
Eyal:
 
That may be what they would say. It’s a popular position–and one that Larsen takes to task. He writes that Marxist thought criticizes Enlightenment values by offering “particular universals” (15): reason is time-bound, but it is universal at any point in time because of “the social universality of the proletariat” (6). Larsen uses this claim to indict postmodernism– which he reads much as you do here, John–as promoting contexts that are not grounds; he charges that postmodernists appeal to irrationalism instead of recognizing the claims of Marxist universals, and their irrationalism then allows them to deflect the charge against capitalism (7, 9).
 
Elaine:
 
As a feminist reader responding to these essays, I find myself struggling with the very tension we are talking about–between attention to the particular and a yearning, to use hooks’s word, for a transcending idea, a narrative which helps me evaluate what I read. hooks begins her essay by telling us that she is a black woman at a dinner party (which one other black person is attending). This is certainly a context, but in the end when she tells us about talking with other black people about postmodernism, context attains a kind of transcendence–hooks’s “authority of experience.” Likewise, Yudice’s focus on bulimia seems driven by a desire to understand the body’s participation in larger designs and meanings.
 
Eyal:
 
There is a similar impulse in several of these works. Yudice moves from class and gender to “the mystic” (5); hooks returns to “yearning” as the common condition (9); Schultz finds in Bernstein’s poem an “elegiac tone” (10); and Acker says that she is a romantic and projects that romanticism in her stand as artist- against-the-dead-world.
 
John:
 
Acker does sound like an idealist when she asks whether “matter moving through forms [is] dead or alive,” and she sounds romantic when she asserts that “they can’t kill the spirit.” But the transcendence she describes at the beginning of her narrative is transcendence within language: “when I write, I enter a world which has complex relations and is, perhaps, illimitable. This world both represents and is human history, public memories and private memories turned public, the records and actualizations of human intentions. This world is more than life and death, for here life and death conjoin.” Perhaps she fails in her stated desire not to have a voice (as Schultz argues the Language Poets do), but it seems to me that her piece is not only about “the artist against the world,” but also about the contact between the writer and the world–an unpleasant contact between a fragmented individual and the monolithic forces behind property law, involving a struggle over language, and the right to language.
 
Elaine:
 
Many of the writers here (Schultz, English, hooks, Beverley, Ross) illustrate the power of culture (rather than of the individual) to determine our use of language and the creation of texts. Schultz’s point about McGann’s classification of the contributors to Verse–that the difference between “Language writing, properly so called” and “language-centered writing” appears to be a matter of big names vs. lesser knowns– raises the issue of politics within academic writing (a criticism that may be relevant to the project of creating this journal). But what Schultz’s review accomplishes, and what Ross, Beverley, and hooks suggest we should attempt, is an interrogation of authorities. These writers believe such a practice can make a difference.John:I think Larsen would say that the interrogation of authority is not in itself the practice that will make a difference; he feels, as Eyal pointed out, that liberal critiques of authority ultimately serve the interests of authority by helping to “displace or pre-empt” revolutionary political practice. On the other hand, the authors you mention all aim at something beyond critique or interrogation. Ross, for example, argues directly against the idea (expressed in Larsen) that cultural authority is monolithic, because he wants to persuade us that change is possible: “capitalism is merely the site, and not the source, of the power that is often autonomously attributed to the owners and sponsors of technology” (37). Larsen’s rejoinder is to ask “Where has imperialism, and its attendant ‘scientific’ and cultural institutions, actually given way and not simply adapted to the ‘new social movements’ founded on ideals of alterity?” (29).
 
Eyal:
 
On the whole, the writers in the issue value those who, like themselves, oppose the authoritarian tendencies of society. Social power resides in architecture and we fight it with music (Beverley); political repression is enforced by manipulating our collective image of the body and we fight it with dietary negativity–obesity, bulimia, anorexia (Yudice); society uses “viral hysteria” and the “Computer Virus Eradication Act” to restrict access to technology and information, and we fight it with countercultural hacking (Ross); the publishing establishment enforces copyright and we fight it by acknowledging the intertextual transgression implicit in all artistic practice (Acker). These writers are looking for a place from which to criticize the impulses to power which they uncover in the social text–but then any critical position is bound within that text.
 
Elaine:
 
Critical positions may be bound within the social text, but as we said earlier, some of these writers appear to be in two places at once, positioned in a particular historical political struggle but casting their writing beyond the particular toward some larger claim or understanding. In any case, the difference in our readings of these writers suggests that postmodernism remains fertile territory within which writers can explore new positions, and I find this encouraging. We hoped that Postmodern Culture would provide a place for experimentation, for opening discussions, for dialogue. In some of our early explorations of what the journal could or should be (and do), we expressed a hope that we could dis-establish the practice of admitting only those who speak our language or who position themselves as we do. In fact, we hoped that the medium itself would encourage us to think of our writing as constituted both from the writer’s position and from the readers’. Such thinking (about writing and reading) can lead to further experimentation within the academy, in culture, and with/in those relationships fostered through Postmodern Culture. How much difference we make remains to be seen.