31st December 2015: I’ve just this morning finished
Supplanting the Postmodern, a
bewildering anthology of views of what happened after postmodernism ‘died’ (a
common supposition of the book). While it disgracefully doesn’t mention poetry,
and while some of its contributors (‘Stuckism!’) are plainly silly, the common
perception that the classic postmodernist ‘dogmas’ (those that are now absorbed
and clarified in the summarising literature) no longer fit contemporary (i.e.
21st Century) art, literature, culture, society and technologies, is
persuasive.
Rudrum’s afterword brings into play a quote that haunted my
reading of the previous 300 pages: Lyotard’s observation that ‘postmodernism is
not modernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and that state is recurrent’
(337), which deals deftly with false chronologies (though September 11th,
as in my ‘September 12th’, did
mark a break for me [See here]) – and also brings a constant sense of
crisis to the contemporary. Rudrun’s use of the same parts of Rancière that I
use [in The Meaning of Form, see
here], to show the oscillation between possible views of the
relationships of ‘art’ and ‘life’, and to pitch that view onto some of the ‘post’-postmodernisms
projected, to suggest, in a nod back to [Gerald] Graff, that there is a
pendulum swing between views (‘metamodernism’ provides this metaphor: we’re
swinging between modernist and pomo paradigms, and not settling). There’s no
‘break’.
Stavris, in his afterword,
argues that the ‘anything goes’ of Lyotard (what of [Paul] Feyerabend?) has
given way to ‘a contemporary culture of anxiety’ in which ‘artists attempt to
overcome the uncertainties of the human condition in the twenty-first century
by reaching out for a renewed period of sincerity. Authenticity is the new
focus for the present day artist. The assertion that “Anything Goes” is no
longer the case, nor is it a commonly felt sentiment: the desire for relaxation
has been replaced by the desire to formulate some kind of grip on reality… This
development has occurred in response to a culture of fear’ (350), a ‘climate of
anxiety’ (351). ‘The result is a strong resurgence in the presentation, or
rejuvenation, of self-hood and identity …’ (352). ‘The artist is no longer
concerned with postmodern displacement strategies; instead, their primary aim
is to convey a transition, a positive desire on the part of the subject to
reclaim wholeness and selfhood in a globalized culture that is cloaked in
uncertainty … Our occupation of a cultural landscape that strives for freedom
and autonomy is met with a realigned focus on truth …’ (353). Realisms and
experiment co-exist; religion and spirituality haunt the scene … classic return
of the repressed, actually.
Does any of this reverberate? Critically, my formalist bent
is a return to artistic autonomy and human agency in reading, but then I have
never believed ‘the death of the author’ in its common misreadings. A diarist
of such prodigious energy, I can hardly have subscribed to the ‘death of the
subject’. The birth of the reading subject has always been important [to me].
Something interesting happened towards the end of Warrant Error – the need to assert human values and to express them
more directly, [see below] and in the current 14 liners [the sequence ‘It’s
Nothing’, see here] I’m finding that they keep vacillating between their
fictive constructedness and the desire to attain (I suppose) a realist
epistemology. ‘Metaxis … simultaneously here, there, and nowhere’. (325)
Oscillation, betweenness, is another theme [of the book, not my poems] (so is
the role of technology in creating the appearance of the real, and engendering
a (false) sense of human autonomy, represented by the docusoap and the ‘personalized’
playlist, respectively. Of course, ‘fear’ is the fear of economic downturn,
terrorism, and eco-disaster, in the above accounts: September 12th
and the Era of Immiseration, as co-existent extremes).
Obviously, this summary is too clenched, my reading too
recent, to come to conclusions. (Not that I’m trying to: I’m trying to use the
book for poetics.) I see parallels with things I’ve been doing, but it is
noticeable that most of the referenced art and literature I’ve not [seen or]
read. It perhaps strengthens my resolve about parts of my recent work (the end
of Warrant Error, the ‘Poems Against
Death’, these ‘domestic’ poems [elsewhere I describe ‘It’s Nothing’, half
complete, as ‘about domestic qualia, and above all, a kind of haunted John
Jamesian pleasure]) that gesture towards selfhood and transparency – though it
will never be the simple default mode of the Movement Orthodoxy, still
pervasive, I’d say. [Later I write: ‘They do
keep reticulating, in the sense of becoming more
self-conscious the more they are conscious of self – that diminished,
displaced, but present, “me”. See
here.]
The theorists are often clear that art is striving for an autonomy or a freedom that it will never achieve: it refuses
the simpler PoMo gesture of articulating a tired resignation in the face of
received ‘impossibilities’: it has never seemed persuasive on that front.
I’m not expecting such a book to really tell me what’s going on. In some ways the example of the
fossilization of postmodern ideas speaks against such epochal adventures, but
it is interesting to see commonalities, in one’s work, and to generally suggest
that postmodernism (a term I haven’t used (much) since 1987, when I defined it
quite precisely [see ‘Flashlight Propositions 1987, here]) no longer offers a
dominant paradigm, that things have shifted. Yet the alternatives don’t
convince: they register a general impulse. It doesn’t answer where conceptual
writing might lie, where kinds of inventive translation might lie. [See here
and here for those.]
The ‘altermodernist (artist) is a homo viator,’ write Vermeulen and Van den Akker of Bourriaud,
‘liberated from (an obsession with) his/her origins, free to travel and
explore, perceiving anew the global landscape and the “terra incognita” of history’, (312) a view which
suggests that ‘multiform unfinish’ is a strong position, not an evasive one
(which was the fear), ‘enthusiasm as well as irony’, (318), ‘to pursue a
horizon that is forever receding’ (325).
*
24th April 2016: The entry ends there; perhaps
I'm trying to pick up a few themes I thought I’d not captured already, particularly
‘enthusiasm’. I interestingly pass over the ‘religious’ aspects (although I
remember thinking that humanists and the Brights might have something to fight
for and against at last, not least of all in response to killings of secular
academics in Bangladesh and elsewhere). The
observation that postmodernism and post-post modernism will co-exist remained
undeveloped but is present at a couple of points. They were, are, notes I want to come back to. Here are two poems that seem
to have been in the back of my mind, from the end of Warrant Error (see here):
Two poems from ‘Out of Nowhere’ from Warrant Error
You build from song
an architecture of tumbles
a dance of stumbles on a shelf of air.
You name this the space left by the human.
You excavate Babylon
and the ribbons of tight ink on Pinkas Synagogue wall
with the surnames’ bejewelled rubrication
(Whenever erased they’re re-written
the act of their scrubbing
inscribed anew)
Stones leaning splinter through time
for those with no names
possess no death. You ex-
hume the ex-human in human unfinish
After the Last Word
of the dead text necrophiles come
our next words
which yet survive
as reasons
for living happily out
of nowhere and now
and then on to multitopia bearing
the stories so far
whose passions read as co-
eval becomings
geographies of affect in
capital Isness where
human unfinish is all about
The first also appears in my Selected Poems History or Sleep (unlike the second,
which, incidentally, is a collage of quotatioins from everybody from Philip Roth to Doreen Massey). See here for details.
