How Big Is Political?
For
some writers literature is history. For some it is norms. For others it is just
about everything else. Or, so it seems:
Once
upon a time, humanity realized that many individuals were increasingly
withdrawing from the streets…into other universes: their rooms, skulls, echoes
of somebody else’s words…At that point in history, humanity started
compulsively thinking about the places where the soles touched the ground…and
everybody was wondering if those places were good for laying their weary feet
on the soil…nobody seemed to have an answer…The question was a
shuttle-locomotive running from one ear to another, drawing ellipsoid orbits on
the cracked inside of the crania… buildings were tumbling down outside…and
there was no answer…because nobody knew where was what…or from…or who…
This essay explores certain aspects
of the investment in creation. In order to elucidate the ways in which
writing-reading resists ossification, vocabularies concerned with the character
of literature and culture are put in
conversation. As a result, potentially illuminating insights are borne out of a
fruitful oscillation between dissensus and agreement, between and amongst
troublesome pairs: pleasure and normativity, inherent and culturally
conditioned, individuality and communality, authorship and text, biography and
hermeneutics, social plane and idiosyncratic intricacies, to name just a few.
The ideas of T.S. Eliot, Richard Rorty, Paul de Man, Terry Eagleton, and
McKenzie Wark are presented along with a metafictional case study to illustrate
the supposedly clashing axes and demonstrate the unsayable as the language of
the remix.
A perspective from which the
abovesaid issues can be observed is the one concerned with the dialogue between
formal literary features and their relation to extralinguistic realities. In
that context, one is yet again faced with the necessity of avoiding
reductionist portrayals of the encounter with a literary work. Neither cocooned,
overprotected from and/or indifferent to the cultural, nor overdetermined by it
seems to be the character of writing-reading.
Is that part of the way new formalism sees the activities occurring in the
world of letters?
If new formalism is a return to
aesthetics, then it’s right to implicitly indicate supremacist inclinations of
certain vocabularies. It is probably even more accurate in defining the
boundaries of the new movement by putting emphasis on the formality/formalism
distinction. Moreover, balancing between the legacy of the new criticism and
new historicism, new formalism rightly sees its potential territory in the
marriage of beauty and activity. T.S. Eliot:” [W]hen a people is passive, may
be torpor: when a people is quick and self-assertive, the result may be chaos”
(“Unity
and Diversity: Sect and Cult,” Notes
towards the Definition of Culture 71). And chaotic it was. The new world that humanity saw the first
half the twentieth century can surely be an explanation for the new critics’
insistence on a radical autonomy of literature, literary theory, and criticism.
Today, one is prone to see the legacy in a remixed form, along the lines of
Terry Eagleton’s thought:
From modernism proper, postmodernism inherits the
fragmentary or schizoid self, but eradicates all critical distance from it…From
the avant-garde, postmodernism takes the dissolution of art into social life,
rejection of tradition, an opposition to ‘high’ culture as such, but crosses
this with the unpolitical impulses of modernism […] An authentically political
art in our own time might similarly draw upon both modernism and the avant-garde,
but in a different combination from postmodernism. (“Capitalism, Modernism and
Postmodernism,” Against the Grain: Essays
1975-1985, 146-7)
However, one wonders how unpolitical
is unpolitical, if understood in holistic terms the way Eliot did: ”Yet there
is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from
morning to night and even in sleep, and the way of life is also its culture”
(“The Three Senses of Culture, ” Notes towards the Definition of
Culture 31). The fragmented culture that is today taken for
granted, if with different degrees of resistance, for Eliot and his
contemporaries was alarming enough to inspire designing a platform from which
to confront it: ”Culture
may even be described as that which makes life worth living” (“The
Three Senses of Culture,” Notes towards
the Definition of Culture 27).
The first half of the twentieth
century found the Western world bewildered by the newly emerged circumstances
in which war, destruction, collapse of order, and eroded morality played
crucial roles in shaping individual lives and socioscape alike. Strikingly
differing from anything that humanity experienced before, the world was faced
with a demand to respond to the novel realities. A devastating effect of The
First and the Second World Wars exposed the reasons for profound suspicion
about humanity and civilization. Individuals
whose life heavily relied on creation felt particularly compelled to speak
about it. Sometimes their voices were loud cries, sometimes shadow-talk.
Regardless of the tonal register,
they were patently calls addressed to fellow-contemporaries. At times, those
were embittered laments; often, they
were reanimating tactics. As a rule, they
acted as an injection of new blood in the humanity’s polluted body. In
other words, those calls were mighty weapons of regaining human dignity through
the power of creation against the acute aural infestation that invaded the
intersubjectival web. Concomitant with that was the noise precluding clear
vision from within. In response, fresh vocabularies are being devised. New
realities demand new ways of speaking about
new experiences: “When the poem has been made, something new has
happened, something that cannot be wholly explained by anything that went before. That, I believe, is what we mean by
‘creation’” (“The Frontiers of Criticism,” On
Poetry and Poets 112).
Enduring Naming
In “Literary History and Literary Modernity” from
Blindness and Insight (1971), Paul de Man illustrates the dilemma resulting from
a creative impulse. He centers
the analysis around the clashing
aspects of it, emphasizing the inevitability of fresh literary pieces’ being
simultaneously self-interpreting and interpretations of the existing texts:
The
ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an
interpretative process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide.
As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature or specificity. Unlike the
historian, the writer remains so closely involved with action that he can never
free himself of the temptation to destroy whatever stands between him and his deed,
especially the temporal distance which makes him dependent on an earlier past.
The appeal of modernity haunts all literature. (152)
Occasionally,
literature responds to the appeal. Such attempts de Man sees as
blindness of literature caused by “romantic disease,” (“Criticism and Crisis”
13) the haunting ghost of the romantic belief in poetry as the mirror of the
world: “The fallacy of the belief that, in the language of poetry, sign and
meaning can coincide, or at least be related to each other in the free and
harmonious balance that we call beauty, is said to be a specifically romantic
delusion” (“Criticism and Crisis” 12).
It might be a
romantic delusion to believe that there is such correspondence, but the
indefatigable reoccurrence of the appeal of immediacy is as an undisputable
characteristic of literary fabric as is its mediating nature: “No true account
of literary language can bypass this persistent temptation of literature to
fulfill a single moment. The temptation of immediacy is constitutive of
literary consciousness and has to be included in the definition of the
specificity of literature” (“Literary History and Literary Modernity” 152). The mediatory
dialectic creates a lacuna, revealing literature’s playing on the edge of
the abyss, as if it were tending to substantialize the absence, the void. Such tendencies
sustain an ongoing deferral of the cancellation of mediation: ”It is this
possibility that constitutes the supreme wager; however, since it must remain
wager, it is substance itself that is the abyss” (“The Dead-End of Formalist
Criticism” 245). From this perspective, to create in a literary vernacular is
to face the void and try to find the words to name the abysmal substance. As a
relational vocabulary, literature is not capable of providing means for
superseding the void. All literature can do is simply never stop naming:
“Poetic language names this void with ever-renewed understanding and, like
Rousseau’s longing, it never tires of naming it again. This persistent naming
is what we call literature” (“Criticism and Crisis” 18).
De
Man’s exploration of that naming is depicted through the reflections about the
character of criticism in time of crisis in “Criticism and Crisis.” Reflecting upon the
tension between modernity and historicity of literary creation, de Man
contrasts criticism to the disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, and
philosophy to show their supremacist tendencies in the cultural arena. Criticism, as a metavocabulary, questions and
establishes its own role, all the while
resisting the dominance of other vocabularies. De Man positions criticism simultaneously
scrutinizing
the fabric of the faculty itself and the circumstances vital for its activation. Penetrating the layers
underlying the reading-writing practice occurs in times of crisis, crucial for
the existence of the discipline: “In the periods that are not periods of
crisis, or in individuals bending on avoiding crisis at all costs, there can be
all kinds of approaches to literature: historical, philosophical,
psychological, etc., but there can be no criticism” (“Criticism and Crisis” 8).
From his
other works, such as Critical Writings
1953-1978 (1989) and The Resistance to Theory (1986), it could be
inferred that laying claims about the specificity of the literary-criticism
axis results from contextualizing it historically within the web of diverse
descriptions of the world. More precisely, it could be that the insistence on a
certain autonomy of the language of literature and/or criticism comes as a
response to the age-long role of philosophy as the mediator between the world
and what is being said about it. With the historical paradigm shifts, this mediatory privilege
was passed on to the realm of science and, it seems that de Man feels that
through positivist legacy, the scientific paradigm is still felt as the vocabulary imposed
on that of criticism. Since an “unmediated expression is a philosophical
impossibility” (“Criticism and Crises,” Blindness
and Insight 9), de Man designates the
area of literature as an impossible territory to be explored—and
demystified—philosophically. McKenzie Wark: “But while
one aspect of romanticism is otherworldly, an escape from this alien planet to
one more hospitable, the symbols drawn from the total semantic field can also
be brought back to the everyday. They can be lived” (The Beach beneath the Street 107).
If all
comfort is to be found along the paths of theoretical art of mimicry, then all
poetry is always already subtonically historicized. If all genuinely mimicry-based theoretical
art is always already justified by its imperfection, then its reality is either
in its purposelessness or in its radically immutable variability. If the glow projected from the torch is always
already cast under sullenly tedious everydayness, the brutality of mundane
immediacy is always historically theoretizable. DaerfoYr, it carries in itself
potential for playing a role of the buffer between the dis-quiet buried deep in
the mind’s engine and itself. As such, it is a chimera of its own doubling,
while, in fact, it only acts as both—itself and a protection between itself and
something else. Since the buffering territory is where one’s juggling gift
finds its most fruitful justification, the chimera of doubling – i.e.
double-role-playing immediacy of everyday experience – is also where nearly
each subtonic pilgrimagist conjures up one’s way of researching the paths of
the historical nature of one’s
artistry and/or identity of a
theoretico-poetrician.
Names’n’Uses
In accord with the antifoundational aspect of
de Man’s thought, Richard Rorty, nonetheless, remarks in it traces of deterministic
thinking, a sense of an essentialist apparatus, lurking from de Man’s
reflections about literature and criticism.
In
“De Man and the American Cultural Left” from
Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991), Rorty’s ironist reading,
integrating latent psychoanalytic elements, focuses on the notion of longing in
de Man’s explanation about poetic language as enduring naming of the void. From
that angle, such drive is understood as desire that can never be satisfied:
“the fact that language is a play of relations is just one more example of the
more general fact that desire is, in its inmost nature, unsatisfiable” (131).
To Rorty’s mind, this particular fact indicates essentialism in guise: “De Man
should not turn essentialist at the last moment by claiming to have discovered
such a nature” (131).
This complements Rorty’s
reflections about the tension between theorizing and poeticizing discourses from Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). Admittedly, his own vocabulary is oxymoronically called
postphilosophical philosophy. Such a position entails uneasy negotiations
between private idiosyncrasies and communal rhetoric: “moral objection to
textualism […] is also an objection to the literary culture’s isolation from
common human concerns. It says that people like Nietzsche, Nabokov, Bloom, and
Foucault achieve their effects at a moral cost which is too much to pay” (158).
He confesses, however, that he has no discursive way to support the belief in
the impossibility of translation between the public and the private, or between
fantasy and theory. What could be called
the ironist dilemma is the implication of an antimetaphysical understanding
of the world manifested in the irresolvable tension between the need to stand
up for what is morally salient and inability to argumentatively defend one’s
stance. Rorty focuses on the conversation between and among diverse
vocabularies without proscribing a normativity for the dialogue:
Bloom’s way
of dealing with texts preserves our sense of common human finitude by moving
back and forth between the poet and his poem. Foucault’s way of dealing with
texts is designed to eliminate the author – and indeed the very idea of “man” –
altogether. I have no wish to defend Foucault’s inhumanism, and every wish to praise Bloom’s sense of our common human
lot. But I do not know how to back up this preference with argument, or even
with the precise account of the relevant differences. (158)
Examining the new criticism, Rorty agrees
with the claim that literature cannot reveal anything outside of itself (Consequences
of Pragmatism 155). However, he disagrees with prioritizing close reading as the method for
textual analysis because claiming a method implies claiming an epistemology --
mimicking philosophy (156), thereby abandoning the model of an autonomous,
revolutionary vocabulary that
establishes itself devising an authentic mode of speaking. Such attempts prevent poeticizing
of culture, since they confine literature and literary to the realm of old
vocabularies: “The weakest way to
defend the plausible claim that literature has now displaced religion, science,
and philosophy as the presiding discipline in our culture is by looking for a
philosophical foundation for the practices of contemporary criticism” (155).
Rorty is
contrasting the new
criticism to the next
historical occurrence of text-oriented antimetaphysical thought that focuses on
nontranscendent/nontranscendental character of literature. This group of
thinkers he calls textualists: ”[T]he so called ‘Yale school’ of literary
criticism centering around Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller,
and Paul de Man, ‘post-structuralist’ French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and
Michel Foucault, historians like Hayden White, and social scientists like Paul
Rabinow” (139). This school of thought
Rorty considers to be genuinely modernist – it nonargumentatively introduced
new forms of reading literature, neither proscribing a method, nor assigning to
their activity the status of a privileged vocabulary. Consequently, their works
epitomize Rorty’s perception of poeticized culture based on a new understanding
of literature and meaning as creation, rather than discovery: “By ‘literature,’
then I shall mean the areas of culture which, quite self-consciously, forego
agreement on an encompassing critical vocabulary, and thus forego
argumentation” (142).
If all
poetry happens in time, one moast always theorize. If theory reflects one’s
meditative perception of the world, one moast not replicate the object of the
metavocabulary. Even if one could. If theoryverse is a world in its own right,
its reality is lived out through its closeness to itself. And, by extension, to
reality. At bottom, the extension lies in its exegesis, i.e. in its originating
from a meditative search for the buffer between the profound dis-quiet with the
immediate everyday experience and the knowledge of a suspiciously empirical
character buried in the heart of the mind’s engine.
Poeticized Philosophy
In
“Pragmatist
Progress” (1992) Rorty further develops vision of nonargumentative
writing, previously
exposed in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). Specifically, writing is
presented as an act of creating meaning by different readers to different ends.
Similarly, literary criticism is not understood as a practice of seeking for
the hidden, real meaning of the text, because there is no such thing. Instead,
there are as many meanings as there are uses of text within the process of knitting an
intertextual, hybrid web of revised vocabularies from the past and of the present. This
perspective delineates the contested boundaries of the activity called literary
criticism:
It [literary criticism] originally meant
comparison and evaluation of plays, poems and novels – with perhaps an
occasional glance at the visual arts. Then it got extended to cover past
criticism […] Then, quite quickly, it got extended to the books which had
supplied past critics with their critical vocabulary and were supplying present
critics with theirs. This meant extending it to theology, philosophy, social
theory, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestos. In short,
it meant extending it to every book likely to provide candidates for a person`s
final vocabulary (81).
Commenting on
the revised notion of literary criticism, Rorty observes that the term cultural
criticism would more accurately describe the actual practice. However, he notes
that “literary” has, nevertheless, endured. Thus instead of renaming the term
literary criticism, the notion of literature has changed:
It is a
familiar fact that the term “literary criticism” has been stretched further and
further in the course of our [the twentieth] century…This meant extending it to
theology, philosophy, social theory, reformist political programs, and
revolutionary manifestos. In short, it meant extending it to every book likely
to provide candidates for a person`s final vocabulary […] So instead of
changing the term “literary criticism” to something like “culture criticism,”
we have instead stretched the word “literature” to cover whatever the literary
critics criticize. (81)
Casting
aside any immutable component of reading-writing, these fluid, dedivinized
notions of literature and literary criticism enable a plurality of created
meanings. In other words, instead of proving to have “the key to the door,”
this antifoundationalist approach to the world
of letters is a revolutionary paradigmatic shift of cultural vocabulary:
This is what
the literary culture has been doing recently, with great success. It is what
science did when it replaced religion and what idealist philosophy did when it
replaced science. Science did not demonstrate
that religion was false, nor philosophy that science was merely phenomenal,
nor can modernist literature or textual criticism demonstrate that the “metaphysics of presence” is an outdated
genre. But each in turn has managed, without argument, to make its point. (Consequences of Pragmatism 155)
Such shifts of paradigms Rorty sees as crucial
for poeticizing of culture. Accordingly, radical examples of the revolutionary
practice include Harold Bloom’s “strong misreading” and later Derrida -- “the
period in which his writing becomes more eccentric, personal, and original” (123).
In the essay “From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida” in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty praises
Derrida’s challenging the consensus about the supremacy of argumentative
discourse, simultaneously confronting the domesticated private-public binary:
I take Derrida’s importance to lie in his
having had the courage to unite the private and the public, to stop trying to
bring together a quest for private autonomy and an attempt at public resonance
and utility. He privatizes the sublime, having learned from the fate of his
predecessors that the public can never be more than beautiful. (125)
Similarly,
de Man points out the potential of Derrida’s writing: “His text, as he puts it so
well, is the unmaking of
a construct. However negative it may sound, deconstruction implies the
possibility of rebuilding” (“The Rhetoric of Blindness,” Blindness and Insight 140).
It is precisely Derrida’s
belief in the
limitless potential of literature that entails the idea of inexhaustible activity of creation.
Once
upon a time humanity found itself plagued by lexical proliferation. The
critical area of confusion happened to be the schizoid split within the term
privacy. On the one hand, the meaning of the word got atomized through the replication,
resulting in seemingly akin, yet, in fact, resolutely distinct concepts such as
intimacy, individuality, identity. On the other hand, however, the
fragmentation in question lead to an overwhelming sense of universality,
contained in the interaction between and amongst the particularities at stake.
The universality that, for some reason, felt unbearable. Unbearable for the
counterintuitive clash between resemblance and differentiation.
Counterintuitive because intuition presumes coincidence, resonance, and/or convergence between logically discordant
phenomena. Logically discordant because of the counterintuitive, a priori laws
of logic. Counterintuitive because of the logic of negation of innate
categories. Negation because of the facticity of the constructivist character
of the mind. Constructivist because of the counterintuitive nature of the
perception and meaning of the likes of color red as a stimulation of neurons,
communication between transmitters and the rest of the nervous system,
climaxing in the signal reaching the target in the central part of it,
revealing to the remaining parts of the organism that the sensory input
translates into Я-AE-D.
Dedivinizing Cultural Reshifting
Thus, is the world of letters solely
discursive matter? If so, could it be granted autonomy, provided that cultural
realities are discursively conditioned, as well? If not, can the world be free
from cultural overdeterminism? Consequently, does it mean that one is not
doomed to the deprivation of an idiosyncratic idiom? Can extraliguistic
realities inform that who one is? In an age of peculiar pluralism, a double
blessing enables voicing out diverse beliefs, simultaneously imposing
boundaries on the vocabularies in which they are verbalized. Thus, one wonders
how to resist oppression and express that what refuses to disappear: a sense
that part of reading-writing might be creation of meaning haunts ceaseless explorations
of literary fabric.
According
Rorty, many supposedly revolutionary
redescriptions of the vocabulary of culture have merely been shifts of the focus. For
instance, the Enlightenment refocused human existence from God to science. Classical
German Idealism denounced the language of science and argued that the
vocabulary of philosophy being congruent with that of reality, while the
Romantic poets shifted the focus from philosophy to poetry: “Kant and Hegel
went only halfway in their repudiation of the idea that truth is ‘out there’[…]
What was needed, and what the idealists were unable to envisage, was a
repudiation of the very idea of anything – mind or matter, self or world –
having an intrinsic nature to be expressed or represented” (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 4).
Vital to the analysis is
Rorty’s observation about the role of irony with regard to revolutionary
vocabularies. More precisely, an ironist vocabulary does not strive to step
outside the realm of the private and poeticized. Such an attempt leads to what
is in Heideggerian terms called a metaphysical relapse. Just as Heidegger
accuses Nietzsche of Platonism in disguise, Rorty criticizes Heidegger’s
attempt to overcome metaphysics and all overcomings by introducing yet another
capitalized notion – Being.
Analogously, Rorty claims
that the Romantic poets partially redescribed the vocabulary of culture of the nineteenth century. He sees
the significance of Romanticism in its centering culture around a secular,
albeit nonscientific, nonphilosophical vocabularies. Although a major
contribution to a poeticized culture, Romantic irony is decisively distinct
from liberal irony. While both imply radical playfulness, the former, based on
Friedrich Schlegel’s thought in Lucinde
and the Fragments (1971), is defined in terms of the absolute and
necessity: “Irony is the freest of all licences, for by its means one transcends
oneself; and it is also the most lawful, for it is absolutely necessary” (161).
Additionally, it is concerned with concepts such as infinity, the distinction between text and reality, and the perception of poetry as
representation: “In each of its representations / transcendental poetry should
/ also represent itself, and should always be both poetry and the poetry of
poetry” (242).
From
the Romantic point of view, culture is poeticized because it is in poetry where
the key that opens the door to the Truth can be found. Thus, in A Defence of Poetry (1910) Shelley claims that poets are “the
unacknowledged legislators of the world” (233). However, despite sharing a
common belief in poetry as the language connecting microcosmic and macrocosmic voices, there
were discrepancies among the Romantics
understandings of poetics. For instance, in Biographia Literaria (1817),
Coleridge claims that truth has a polyvalent, instead of monolithic,
character: “I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not from whose mouth the sounds are
supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible” (89).
However, he stresses an organic nature of poetry, implying traditional,
metaphysical notions: “A legitimate poem[…]must be one the parts of which
naturally support and explain each other” (172).
These contradictions make Rorty suspect that the irony in the Romantic
poetry is not necessarily the same as the one he is offering as a descriptive
strategy. He also finds it reasonable to believe that the Romantic and ironist
worlds do not share the same vision of a poet as the central cultural hero —
the latter is a dedivinized version of the former. This is reflected in his
recapitulation of historical reshifting from religion to poetry via science and
philosophy -- secular vocabularies reverberating with the sacredness they were
trying to refute:
I can crudely sum up the
story which historians like Blumenberg tell by saying that once upon a time we
felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Beginning
in the seventeenth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of
God, treating the world described by science as a quasi divinity. Beginning at
the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of ourselves
for a love of a scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual or poetic
nature, treated as one more quasi divinity. (22)
Dead Words
Nonargumentative, poeticized uses of
text can, thus, be perceived as restorative deconstructionist naming of the
void. Within such a redescription of the notion of literature, theory, and
criticism, one wonders whatever happened to culture. Building on
Eagleton’s aesthetico-political reconfiguration
of the twentieth century vocabularies, the remix might be sketched along
the following lines: (a) The novel, pertinent to creative practices is what one
adopts from the avant-garde uncompromising uprooting; yet, one keeps the
awareness of having his or her vocabulary, to different degrees, inspired
by traditional ones--only remixed; (b)
Fragmentary consciousness that modernists made apparent is, unfortunately, part
of the realities one inhabits today; that, however, does not mean that one is
doomed to insanity; (c) Apolitical preservation of the autonomy of creation is
an integral part of the ultimate dream of freedom; this by no means prevents one from finding ways of
juggling these two seemingly incompatible vocabularies (aesthetic and
political, i.e.).
But how political is it? How
aesthetic? How formalist? Or, how pleasurable, for that matter, in an age of
uncertainty, when nobody knows whether the author is dead, or, whose voice it
is that one utters sentences in. Fredric Jameson: “[T]he end, for example, of style, in the sense of the
unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive brush stroke” (Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism 15). Analyzing architecture, Jameson claims that the human
subject has not kept pace with the mutations of the object, in which a new
space – hyperspace - has been created, and for which one simply does not have
appropriate perceptual habits. In other words, there has not been a mutation on
behalf of the subject equivalent and accompanying that of the object.
The subject’s apparent lagging behind the
advancement of the object can be understood as a consequence of the supposedly
atrophying constituents, affect and style/signature being among them. In a word, incongruence between the object
and the subject in contemporary world is commonly understood as a result of the
subject’s inability to follow the changes happening on the level of the object.
However, it turns out that the subject is not all that disabled. And that what
adds up to its idiosyncratic character (style/signature, for example) seems to
be alive and well. More precisely, unlike in hyperspace, for an entity of a
different shape, such as the style/signature, the subject does have a
corresponding perceptual apparatus: a response is not missing. Thus, the death
of the style/signature seems to be a make-believe reality that resulted from
the fear of the loss of authenticity. Or, the fear of authenticity not being
lost. If the former is the case, one mistakenly believed that what one feared would
happen, actually, did happen. If the latter, one was misled to believe that
something disastrous would happen, should have such a nightmare come true.
Consequently, one lived a delusion of a deprivation
of uniqueness, whereas death of the style actually never occurred. Even
prototypically inauthentic postmodernist works speak in an unmistakably unique
voice. Even those who dismiss the myth of originality create an idiosyncratic
vernacular. Even those who decisively defer authenticity are quite unlikely to
be mistaken for somebody else’s voice. Fredric Jameson:”[P]ostmodernism,
despite its systematic and thoroughgoing rejection of all the features it could
identify with high modernism and modernism proper, seems utterly unable to
divest itself of this final requirement of originality” (Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present 152). One would be prone to say
that whoever cares about authenticity
and the related issues and expresses one’s concerns about them--regardless of
the perspective--unavoidably does so in an idiosyncratic idiom.
Therefore,
death of the style/signature is, essentially, what makes postmodernist a
culture of and/or discourse of denial. The proclamation of the alleged death
comprises of a crass understatement, or, an overstatement about the life of the
subject. Postmodernists are right to inherit a broken image of reality from
modernists. However, such a picture should remain communicable or else the
polyphony is merely a simultaneity of individual, disjoined cacophonic noise,
disinterested in and immune to redemption. If this were the case, the adjective
individual should not be mistakenly
understood to be the stem for the derivation of the noun individuality, but rather of individualism.
Further, postmodernists are right to claim that there are as many
descriptions as there are idiosyncratic idioms, but this truth does not entail
a presumption that all of them are tenable. Finally, postmodernists are right
to believe in inauthenticity not because its opposite is untrue, but because a
replica is an impossibility.
Along with the death of
the subject, author, self, style, uniqueness, totality, postmodernism claims
the death of history. In The Cultural
Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 (1998), Jameson challenges it: “But the notion of the ‘end of
history’ also expresses a blockage of the historical imagination” (91).
Similarly, other blockages preclude other kinds of imagination. For example,
the imposition of the supposed multiple deaths overshadows the theoretical
imagination--the right to remix and see the signature/style and solidarity as
compatible. Impositions of that kind attempt to persuade one that something
dreadful will happen to cultural polyphony if one lives one’s uniqueness. It
aspires to overthrow one’s belief that, actually, there is nothing wrong with the
subjects’ being individuals. And alive.
Such impositions threaten the creative imagination
and the potential of the textual. Since the literature of the twentieth and the
twenty-first centuries has to a large extent been self-reflective, it has also
been a form of denial of its potential and a delusion about its dead-end. In
response to that, non-existent, inauthentic voices are heard as a call for
reanimation of the tired body of literature and supposedly nonexisting
readers/writers—subjects. Human, at that. Well, stories, to be sure, must have a say in that matter. [i]
[i] All pictures by the author. This essay, in a modified version and entitled "Nonprescriptive Narratives: Disruptions in Discourse, Wellspring of Words," was published in New Formalism Of/On The Contemporary, guest ed. Nicholas Birns. Spec. Issue of
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