A Time for Reconstruction: Postmodernism in/of the Third Millennium
Adriana-Cecilia Neagu
Behind the question of the year 2000, the more general problem is that of the end, of what is
beyond the end or, on the contrary, of the restrospective movement caused by the proximity of the
end. Are we at the end of history, beyond history, or still in an endless history? (Baudrillard 1998)
Drawing upon the significant insights into change and cultural change contributed by
comparative cultural studies over the past three decades or so, this paper proposes a
corollary discussion of current directions in postmodern practice and thought from the
vantage point of the phenomenon’s contending heterodoxies and inner contradictions.
Making use of a by now already classical deconstructive methodology, it aims at rereading Postmodernism against what I distinguish as one of its most evident paradoxes:
the anxieties that on the one hand it has echoed and, on the other, projected onto the
discipline of the humanities. As with all demonstrative deconstructive ‘gazes’, the
proposed analysis is purposely angled, hunting for those points of rupture that inhere in
the postmodernist poetics, and that High Postmodernism, as the expression of
Postmodernism’s coming of age is trying or failing to grapple with.
Building on the laws of cyclicity embedded in the theory of the dominant as well as on a
set of propositions pertaining to the institutional turn toward postmodernism, this enquiry
states the case for postmodernism’s foundering as a discursive mode, and its
consummation as a cultural phase. As well as uncovering Postmodernism’s complicity
with the humanist crises that it deplores, the examination expects to articulate some of
the ways in which the will to performativity that postmodern discourses never tire of
celebrating does not necessarily equal performativity. Among the arguments supporting
the vision of a declining postmodernist discourse, the need for reintegration and the
regaining of a lost centrality play a crucial part. Misconstrued as an appanage of its
discursive formation, Postmodernism’s self-interest is in my view debilitating and
inevitably conducive to structures of exclusion, the kind the phenomenon started out by
exposing. A brief consideration of postmodernism and ethics hopes to reveal how
Postmodernism’s deferral of positioning --like the freeplay of its postructuralistically
inherited infinite textuality-- devolves the sense of authority and responsibility upon
individuals and institutions, speaking to ‘whomever it may concern’, and thus ‘marching
to the sound of different drummers’. This evasion of Postmodernism in dissent together
with the sectarian fragmentariness that mars the horizon of contemporary culture, I
would like to explore in relation to Postmodernism’s millennial turn, thus trying out a
tentative answer to the question “whither Postmodernism?”
What Postmodernism was is a question that has already been addressed,
negociated with and responded to from a variety of angles and in the meta- and metametalanguages of almost every sphere of thought, culture and learning. And while
analysts have finally agreed to disagree on its origins and canons, they seem to be at a
loss for both open accord and open disaccord when it comes to its implications and
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future directions. This comes as no surprise since passing judgement on the
contemporary ”event-scene”1 is an unsafe bet enough given the ’flows’ and meanders of
the volatile present; forecasting the near future is already an intellectual gambling that
most ’knowledge workers’ of today would regard as ludicrous. Beyond the inner
contradictions that Postmodernism shares with all period concepts, and the hazards of
exercising analytical foresight in relation to what it is pre- there are ’postmodern-specific’
difficulties inherent in the phenomenon’s particularly awkward position towards its period
status. Deriving from the latter is that, most ironically, the unrelenting wars that
Postmodernism has waged against fundamentalism in all registers of discourse have
gradually become the very battles that many of those looking beyond its horizon are now
engaged in. In other words, the categorial absolutes that postmodernists, as routinised
deconstructors, have gone to such lengths to unmask, come back to haunt them in the
paradoxical guise of their own propositions being at times turned into postulates. Thus
taken for granted, Postmodernism’s anti-universalistic anti-imperialistic tenors underwent
a process of ’museumification,’ in which, on the one hand, the phenomenon gained
unquestionable institutional dominance, on the other, its reflexive act failed to keep pace
with its own development as ”the Equivocal Autobiography of an Age” (Hassan 2000:
12). Unawaringly --a term one would have hardly thought fitting with reference to it-through the ’absolute relativisation’ of epistemologic, ethical and aesthetic norms that it
campaigned for, Postmodernism has elicited forms of dogmatism calling into question
the very performative status of its enquiry. This as in the closed self-referential circuit
that postmodern investigation operates, the object of enquiry is bound to be feedbacked
by the semiotic hence the circularity of the ’same difference.’ More specifically, the
postmodern enquiring subject being par excellence structured as language, the
performativity of postmodern investigation is obscured by its narcissistic quests, of which
the compelling iteration of linguistic immanence. From this vantage point,
Postmodernism may well be in need of a process of ’re-postmodernisation’ just as
deconstruction shows signs of deconstructing itself, and therefore, stepping into its own
’reconstruction.’ By ’re-postmodernisation’ we mean a re-thinking of itself in terms of
discursiveness, performativity and constructedness, i.e. of those chief attributes more or
less unanimously considered to typify the postmodern project.
The infelicitous condition of postmodern theory and practice, of both embodying
and representing ’the desert of reality,’ the ’always already’ of the present moment, is
what makes for Postmodernism’s entry into its own obsolescence:
This act of self-reflection is unstable, as all autobiographies must be which try to understand a life
in the very process of living, it must be unstable --and this is the essence of the second difficulty I
mentioned here. Put still another way: postmodernism has changed, zig-zagged, in the very
process of revealing itself, as we have changed in the process of living our lives. (Hassan 2000:
12-13)
The ultra-newness that the patriarchs of High Postmodernism have now come to be
associated with is not without a history, and in the simultaneous process of manifesting
1
A syntagm describing the field of theorisation of CTheory, one of the highest currency journals of theory,
technology and culture.
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and thinking itself, cultural Postmodernism has not just ceased to keep pace with its own
development, thus losing its ’discursive integrity,’ but it succumbed more and more to
the dictates of postmodernity. The predicaments of culture that Postmodernism started
out by deploring have so engulfed the reflective effort that discussion seems no longer to
abstract itself from the state of affairs that it is expected to illuminate. Over at least four
decades of existence in the double bind situation of subject and object of enquiry,
Postmodernism has become more in culture than of culture, participating in the anxieties
it purported to dispel. And when the age and culture are those ”of inflation” (Newman
1985: 4), the struggle for disaffiliation breeds an even riskier interdependence.
Signals of a post-postmodern turn are also perceptible from the direction of
Postmodernism’s positioning towards old forms. The once radically deconstructive
stance --so apparent in the phenomenon’s potential for undefinining and heavy-weight
derisive arsenal-- seems now to have made way to either complacency or a will to
restoration; and hence the nostalgia is one for the past, a reverse of Jameson’s finding.
In popular culture, the latter tendency is particularly distinct in the New American Film, a
style said to have emerged with productions such as The Matrix, Being John Malkovitch,
American Psycho, American Beauty and Fight Club, which read more like
representations of the longing for a lost centrality, of an object of resistance rather than
acts of resistance in themselves. As a contributor to CTheory: Theory, Technology and
Culture notes, beneath the appearance of castigating the Establishment lies an almost
sentimental projection of its loss:
….Fight Club is actually a nostalgia film. And so are American Beauty, American Psycho, and
Being John Malkovitch. They look postmodern, sound postmodern. But they don’t bark
postmodern, because they’ve got nothing to bark at. All worked up with nowhere to go except
deep inside the Brain, these movies direct their furies at nothing less than the fact of their very
own obsolescence in a culture where nothing really means anything, after all….The movie’s [Fight
Club’s] rebellion doesn’t seek so much to tear down the System, but rather to lash out at its
absence, te re-create the Lost Father, to make Law in the void, to reassert order over
Randomness; in short, to create rules. (Rombes: C Theory, online article)
To a growing number of theorists, the self-formative processes underlying
Postmodernism’s statements, have already been displaced by sound and affirmative
arguments stemming from New Historicism and Cultural Studies. To others, more
concerned with e-theory and digital ideology, the ”dromological”2 and the political
conditions of the twenty first century, Postmodernism has come to be more accurately
described as ’hypermodernism,’3 i.e. a phenomenon not entirely divergent from
modernism and modernity, capitalising on critiques of militarism and technoscience as
the main sources of the contemporary morass. To radical sociologists such as
Baudrillard, Postmodernism is heading toward an obliterating virtualisation. Perhaps the
2
a concept invented by French cultural theorist Paul Virilio, one of the most acclaimed analysts of the art of
technology, a poetician of techno-science and author of a series of topical studies on speed and acceleration in the
contemporary world.
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for a discussion of American media culture and the cultural logic of contemporary ‘infowars,’ see the works of Paul
Virilio, and Arthur and Marilouise Kroker.
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final masterstroke of irony is the authoritarian tone in which High Postmodernism has
sounded the demise of authority in the non-hegemonic, textually constructed (or shall we
say self-destructive) world. From its current canonical position, Postmodernism is
beginning to look mainstream and the tyranny of rhetoricity and textuality, more ’High
Culture’ than ever. The question arises then, did the birth of plurality indeed come at the
expense of the death of hegemony? Or is it that in the so-called ’metamimetic
productivity of writing itself’ such notions are totally immaterial, and that there is no
deliverance from what appears to feel like cultural anarchy?
Whatever the ebbs and flows, the cycles and reclycles of monopolistic,
consumerist and multinational capitalism, to this interpreter of postmodern culture, the
Gulf War did take place, and, whatever the simulation effect, the Reality of it cannot be
undone. In the shadow of what will be remembered as that fateful September 11, it may
well be that gender, class and race politics and the technologies of meaning, the free
play of language and the fictiveness of fiction will take a back seat, and the really
pressing issues commanding attention will become the doom and the gloom of
transnational, transgendered and pan-sexual trauma. ’Real-time’ politics, its centrism
and complicities, biases and compromises will certainly overtake a long-standing
practice of discursive political economy. A heightened perception of the ultimate need for
some verities to hang on to, might even dethrone or at least refine the precepts of the
non-existence of privileged speakers and positions from which to speak. Ethicswise, the
meaning of alterity needs to be rediscovered positively, too many divorcing negative
perspectives marring the enquiries into race, ideology and ethnicity these days.
In the fictional arena, the effervescent experimental agenda that Barth, McEwan,
Pynchon, Barnes,Vonnegut, M. Amis, Barthelme, Coover and other postmodern
pioneers saw as the major priority in the waste land of the post-modernist scene, soon
turned out to be one of ’negative creativity,’ exalting linguistic dysfunctionality and
generating a superabundance of self-mimeticism. And, as the comparative analyses
elaborated in Sublimating the Post-Modern Discourse illustrate, much of what traditional
postmodernist literature represents as perplexing and disabling, is already being
unrepresented in an enabling, reified mode. In their dealings with language scepticism
and logocentricity --two of the axioms clouding the postmodern investigation-- a few
’liberated’ post-postmoderns on both sides of the Atlantic, set the tone for resuscitating
action, moving on as we write into a discourse of recovery and resistance. Furthermore,
some of the by now high priests of literary postmodernism listed above could not but
have learnt the lesson that ’nothing will come of nothing’ and, seem to be now willing to
’speak again.’
Works Cited:
Hassan, Ihab. “What Was Postmodernism and What Will It Become?” in
Twentieth-Century American Literature after Midcentury, International
Conference Proceedings (Kyiv, 25-27 May, 1999). Kyiv: Publishing «Dovira», 2000.
Newman, Charles. The Postmodern Aura: the Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation.
Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985.
Rombes, Nick. “Restoration, American Style” in C Theory: Theory, Technology
and Culture vol. 23, no. 1-2, online version http//: www.ctheory.com.
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