is a posting of what was previously a comment. by request. some will have read this already, in which case, surf elsewhere.]
jeffrey, liberation, or a return to ethics, would be fabulous—would that it were so.... and as to your analogy with regard to definitions of beauty and sublime, i *do* have sublimely dark brown eyes....
and lance, with regard to _american book review_, yeah, jeffrey di leo in houston may take it over---if he did it would be in great hands---but i have heard *nothing* to indicate that this deal went through so i hesitate to name names (too late!).
but that's a side bar to jeffrey's interesting nudge. i like lance's seconding nudge to recall that with pomo sublime we
>put forward the unpresentable in presentation itself
terrific!, and just say no to "consensus of taste"; say yes to "openness"—it all sounds lovely. i don't think it's happening much, but it all sounds lovely.
should i say it's not happening much "any more?" are we ("we") going to grapple at some point with the ... consensus ... that pomo has come and gone and we should be investing in something known as "now what"? i love lytotard too and we need to be conscious of such constructs (is there a collapse that needs to happen between “next” and “now”? are we getting too linear?). presenting the unpresentable is certainly my goal, but we're also going to have to strike out a bit on our own. talk about "open"—unknown territory!—or so i HOPE. i feel like i'm seeing a lot of rehash, even DOING a lot of rehash—maybe all of that is even necessary—but what now? what next? beyond? please not between. to think that we are all writing between movements is just too disabling to me.
what comes beyond presenting the unpresentable? of course, some folks are telling me that the logical next step is presenting the presentable. duh. backwards much? where is *forward*? it's like i can't find the gears on the drive shaft. but forward could be too...linear. where is “the third way”? given a choice between forward or backwards, i would like to see what’s behind door # 3.
which door i do not intend to imply would be a hybrid of representation (realism) and nonrepresentation (the meta- stuff lance suggests). not a hybrid---a THIRD WAY.
sorry to get all buddhist on everybody’s asses. i’m not one, really, i just groove on some of the ways pomo can be very zen....
but what do we think? is pomo over, or what?
thanks,
kass
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6 comments:
Well, if Steve Shaviro is writing on aesthetics, that's a pretty good indication that we've moved beyond the postmodern moment. And I distinctly remember Curt White saying similar things in my Normal days, which were--golly--ten years ago now. "It ain't that hard to figure out," he once wrote me. "Get over it already."
This notion of "presenting the presentable" probably also turned Kathy Acker towards narrative in the early 1990s, so again it's fairly obvious we're through the looking glass of postmodernity.
Or, if Habermas is correct, it's more likely that we've never truly moved past the Modernist project, which might account for this re-emphasis on aesthetics.
It seems to me, though, that we're being teased into thinking way too linearly here, that there's something teleological at work. This blogspace is, after all, inherently begging the question that there is a progression in the first place. Knowledge is recursive, and so is language, and thus must be art (a perfectly flawed syllogism, if there ever was one, no?).
I guess what I'm driving at is these questions about movements beginning/ending become trite impositions at some point, and self-fulfilling half-truths at best. If we set out to create X, do we actually end up with Y? And who is to say what X is in the first place, or that Y is the logical next step? Furthermore, did we ever really exhaust W?
it's probably not over, but it quickly became a boring and used up way to speak of things (see my earlier post on SPEED as the dominant mode of high capitalism)...
i don't think it is boring and used up for academics, seems to have much play in graduate school still.
i do think it is boring and used up for other kinds of readers...
still others get turned on, turnned off, turned on, turned off at irregular intervals.
it may be (still stuck on some of my thoughts on speed, also on physics) that literary "movements" are not a useful way to articulate the motion of art any longer...you know, energy changing forms but not dying...and the digital age perhaps lessening the power of the old "literary period" mechanism of categorizing...i suppose i am personally inside this line of thinking--that we may be moving toward or we are already inside of a historical moment which cannot sustain regular methodologies of literary tracking...
lid
I'm increasingly uncomfortable with terms like "next," "forward," "rehash," "beyond," and others that imply some sort of literary evolution, and hence the idea of some sort of qualitative "improvement." Writing doesn't evolve. It sometimes changes. More often than not over the last century and a half, writing just keeps writing.
Rather, my sense is that we're living, not in times where we seek to present the unpresentable in our language, but rather where the times themselves are unpresentable.
Where, that is, the postmodern sublime is both alive and dead, tomorrow happened yesterday, writing has never been simultaneously more radical and conservative, it's absolutely essential (as well as a doomed enterprise from the start) that the alterantive embraces an eternal recurrence of a literature of resistance, everything is always-already occurring, the most experimental impulses any of us can conjure were coopted by Levi's last month for their new ad campaign.
I wonder if the danger of this (non)situation may turn out to be a kind of intellectual/creative paralysis on the part of those of us who are committed to (re)creating a prose and politics of alternative(s).
And but why hasn't anyone wished everyone a happy Bloomsday yet, anyway?
In a sense, Dimitri, I couldn't agree with you more. The terms we're employing in this conversation, the theorists and writers we cite, the obsessions we convey are all proof that, although postmodernism may be dead, it is also thriving--and through us. Isn't it clear the postmodern is speaking through us all, whether we like it or not?
And, so, Trevor, to Curt White's "Get over it already," I respond: "Get over it already."
And Doug, you say: "i do not think i could ever tell a linear story not because i am an experimental writer and feel politically that that is the way to get a story told in these times but because of who i am genetically and because of how hard i had to fight to tell stories at dinner time."
That strikes me intuitively as correct. I wonder how much of our theorizing comes after the fact to account for what always-already has been: namely that one of the things that binds those of us who care enough to write and/or read this blog (while nitpicking about what doesn't bind us) is that we're wired to resist and refuse and challenge; because of that, we look for language that explains what would happen, what is happening, whether or not we find the language.
Is is pomo that I have to type a weird code, today "pylue," to post this comment? Certainly interrupts Blonde's "speed" a bit..
Maybe, Davis. But it seems more pomo to me that you break the back of your phrasings by beginning the first with a verbal and ending the second with a punctuational mirror.
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