www.facebook.com/kurf.ku www.kurfku.blogspot.com KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.ku www.kurfku.blogspot.com THE IDEA OF THE POSTMODERN The question of what postmodernism actually means is not an easy one to answer: it has meant different things to different people at different times, rising from humble literary-critical origins in the 1950s to a level of global conceptualization in the 1980s. How does the student approaching the subject for the first time distinguish between the various conceptual levels at which the terms ‘postmodern’ and ‘postmodernism’ have been employed, or between the diverse interpretations of the postmodern that—sometimes consecutively and at other times simultaneously—have been put forward over the past thirty years? In The Idea of the Postmodern, Hans Bertens clears up the confusion by tracing and analyzing the debate in an accessible way and witty style. He sets out the interdisciplinary aspects, the critical debates, and the key theorists of postmodernism, and discusses the relationship between postmodernism and poststructuralism, and postmodernism and modernism. The Idea of the Postmodern is an enjoyable and indispensable introductory text for today’s students. Hans Bertens is Professor and Director of American Studies at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. He has written extensively on the subjects of postwar fiction, popular literature, mass culture, and postmodern theory. KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.ku www.kurfku.blogspot.com THE IDEA OF THE POSTMODERN A history Hans Bertens London and New York KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.ku www.kurfku.blogspot.com First published 1995 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an International Thomson Publishing Company © 1995 Hans Bertens All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 0-203-35932-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-37188-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-06011-7 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-06012-5 (pbk) KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.ku www.kurfku.blogspot.com For Laura, Redmer, and Roland KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.ku www.kurfku.blogspot.com CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Part I Postmodernisms 1 INTRODUCTION 3 2 ANTI-MODERNISMS 19 3 MODERNISM, EXISTENTIALISM, 35 POSTMODERNISM: THE 1970s 4 THE 1970s CONTINUED: ARCHITECTURE, THE 51 VISUAL ARTS, POSTMODERNISMS 5 POSTMODERN DECONSTRUCTION: THE 79 POLITICS OF CULTURE Part II …and postmodernities 6 THE 1980s: THEORIZING THE POSTMODERN 107 CONDITION 7 ANTITHETICAL RADICALISMS: RICHARD 133 RORTY AND JEAN BAUDRILLARD 8 FREDRIC JAMESON: FEAR AND LOATHING IN 153 LOS ANGELES 9 POSTMODERN POLITICS 177 10 THE POSTMODERN AS A NEW SOCIAL 201 FORMATION 11 CONCLUSION 229 KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.kuvi www.kurfku.blogspot.com Bibliography 239 Index 257 KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.ku www.kurfku.blogspot.com ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A book of this kind inevitably builds upon numerous other books and the reader will come across them in my references. But books also have less visible debts. This one certainly does. I want to thank my old friend Theo D’haen, who, perhaps to contribute to my education, first got me interested in postmodernism, and I want to thank Douwe Fokkema, who institutionalized that interest by inviting me to participate in an early research project on the modern/postmodern divide. Gerhard Hoffman, still at Würzburg, and Alfred Hornung, now at Mainz, added me to the impressive roster of their Würzburg conferences, leading to a cycle of intellectually exciting and more generally rewarding experiences, both in Germany and in the US. Closer to home, Willem van Reijen joined me for inspiring walks in the woods and offered lucid and helpful commentary on part of my manuscript. Yet closer to home, Prisca Bertens, in spite of her hectic life as a doctor, still found time and energy to give invaluable support. I wrote part of this book while enjoying the hospitality of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and I would like to thank its director, Dirk J. van de Kaa, and the NIAS staff for a wonderful time. Finally, I would, at a less personal level, like to thank the following authors and publishers for their generous permission to quote from the parenthesized titles: Zygmunt Bauman and Routledge (Intimations of Postmodernity), David Harvey and Blackwell (The Condition of Postmodernity) and Fredric Jameson and Duke University Press (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism). KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.kuviii www.kurfku.blogspot.com KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.ku www.kurfku.blogspot.com Part I POSTMODERNISMS KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.ku2 www.kurfku.blogspot.com KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.ku www.kurfku.blogspot.com 1 INTRODUCTION Postmodernism is an exasperating term, and so are postmodern, postmodernist, postmodernity, and whatever else one might come across in the way of derivation. In the avalanche of articles and books that have made use of the term since the late 1950s, postmodernism has been applied at different levels of conceptual abstraction to a wide range of objects and phenomena in what we used to call reality. Postmodernism, then, is several things at once. It refers, first of all, to a complex of anti-modernist artistic strategies which emerged in the 1950s and developed momentum in the course of the 1960s. However, because it was used for diametrically opposed practices in different artistic disciplines, the term was deeply problematical almost right from the start. Let me offer an example. Clement Greenberg, for more than thirty years easily the most influential art critic on the American scene, defined modernism in terms of a wholly autonomous aesthetic, of a radically anti-representational self-reflexivity. For Greenberg, modernism implied first of all that each artistic discipline sought to free itself from all extraneous influence. Modernist painting had thus purged itself of narrative—the presentation of biblical, classical, historical, and other such scenes—which belonged to the literary sphere, and had turned to a necessarily self-reflexive exploration of that which could be said to be specific to painting alone: its formal possibilities. From this anti-representational, formalist point of view, postmodernism gives up on this project of self-discovery and is a (cowardly) return to pictorial narrative, to representational practices. Architectural postmodernism has clear affinities with this. For Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Charles Jencks and other theorists, modernist architecture is the purist self-referential architecture of the Bauhaus-Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, and others—and of the corporate architecture of the postwar International Style. Postmodern architecture turns away from this self- KURF:Karachi University Research Forum ﺟﺎﻣﻌﮧ ﮐﺮاﭼﯽ داراٌﻟﺘﺤﻘﯿﻖ ﺑﺮاﺋﮯ ﻋﻠﻢ و داﻧﺶ www.facebook.com/kurf.ku4 THE IDEA OF THE POSTMODERN www.kurfku.blogspot.com absorbed and technocratic purism and turns to the vernacular and to history, thus reintroducing the humanizing narrative element that had been banned by the Bauhaus group and its corporate offshoots. However, for many of the American literary critics that bring the term postmodernism into circulation in the 1960s and early 1970s, postmodernism is the move away from narrative, from representation. For them, postmodernism is the turn towards self-reflexiveness in the so-called metafiction of the period, as practiced, for instance, by Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, the Surfictionists, the nouveau romanciers, and a host of other writers. For them this particular form of postmodernism rediscovers and radicalizes the self-reflexive moment in an otherwise representational modernism (the self-reflexivity of the later Joyce, especially of Finnegans Wake, of the experiments of Raymond Roussel and others). Seen from this perspective, postmodernism is a move towards radical aesthetic autonomy, towards pure formalism.