July 2008 - Postmodern Critic

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Postmodern Critic - July 2008

Yoko Ono in the Sydney Biennale & Barack Obama in the World

July 27th 2008 09:10

This Wednesday I was finally able to persuade a friend of mine to accompany to the NSW Art Gallery, one of the venues where artworks assembled for the 2008 Sydney Biennale, and while most of the artworks didn't particularly excite me, there were one or two that made the trip worthwhile. My favourite was an installation of a simple-looking telephone into the art gallery space, sitting innocuously on a raised wooden structure. I spotted it from across the room and wondered if it was some kind of conceptual art. As I got closer I noticed that there was some text above the display. Imagine my surprise when I read that, at times suitable for her, Yoko Ono would ring the gallery and the people who happened to be in the room would have the opportunity to talk to her.

What would you ask a Yoko Ono willing to chat with you?

Yoko Ono is perhaps most famous for her relationship with ex-Beatle John Lennon, but she is also renowned for her art, which has appeared in galleries all over the world, including the prestigious Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, where a video of hers is part of the permanent exhibition. The last exhibition of hers I remember in Sydney was 'Ex It', which consisted of a room filled with simple wooden coffins filled with earth, and a tree growing out of the area where a head might rest. She was interested in exploring the idea that from death comes life, the cycles of life. I thought it was a hopeful message from someone who knew the pain of losing a loved one.

If Yoko had called I would have asked her how she was, where she was, does she think her art performance is postmodern, what has she learned from the people she has talked to so far, has her interaction with Sydneysiders changed her views of Australians, and what she was working on right now. What about you?

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I have heard of bit of criticism over Barack Obama's speech in Berlin here and there from people who think that there is more than enough going on in America for him to attend to, but I think his willingness to demonstrate his interest in improving US relations with the rest of the world, particularly Europe, is healthy for everyone involved - Americans get to view him operating outside the familiarity of his usual context, pro-actively taking his message to another continent and building up his foreign affairs cred (where Hillary was perceived to have an edge) in the meanwhile.

Getting the crowd up in a tizzy in Berlin

I am going to be doing all I can to promote Obama between now and the November election. I am looking for funky, inexpensive merchandise to buy since I can't get a free button from MoveOn.org (but if you have an American postal address you can, so don't hesitate to click here and show the rest of the world who you support - the more visible a cause is, the higher its chances for success!), and I will be doing all the e-campaigning work I can think of. Got a suggestion on how I can help? Email me at epiphaniebloom@gmail.com.

Why do I prefer Obama to McCain? He is more progressive in regards to gay rights, more concerned about climate change, seems more flexible in handling the Iraq situation, has been able to sense the anti-American sentiment emanating from all corners of the globe and is interested in recreating a positive international profile for his nation. He interested in maintaining some kind of diplomatic relations with Iran instead of severing all links to them, which really doesn't help, and he is interested in appealing to people of all backgrounds within the USA - on his website you can buy buttons with the following slogans: 'Obama pride' (with a rainbow on it), 'Veterans for Obama', 'African-Americans for Obama', 'Latinos for Obama', '[Something in Hebrew], 'Republicans for Obama', 'Asian Americans Pacific Islanders for Obama', and 'Women for Obama'... and that's just on the first page of the 'store' section of his excellent website, which has been praised for its design.

Even the Irish want to adopt Obama

Perhaps I should I make my own button/badge that says 'Postmodernists for Obama'? ;o)

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On Ihab Hassan's 'From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context'

July 26th 2008 05:22

Extracts from 'From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context' taken from www.ihabhassan.com. My notes are in italics.

What Was Postmodernism?

What was postmodernism, and what is it still? I believe it is a revenant, the return of the irrepressible; every time we are rid of it, its ghost rises back. And like a ghost, it eludes definition.

The supernatural connotations here don’t resonate with me. I find that thinking about postmodernism produces my most lucid and meaningful thoughts – all else is partially illuminating, fails to resonate with my heart and mind.

If you're going to focus on definitions, you might as well make use of the idea of a multiplicity of them, and/or the lack of one universal one. In Ihab's glossary of terms, postmodernism seems to be occupying 'shady' space, but that is to underestimate the potential of every other term for similar thoughts. If postmodernism is ghostly, the Renaissance, Realism and Fluxus must be the same. In this case, is ghostly really the term he would want to come back to?

Certainly, I know less about postmodernism today than I did thirty years ago, when I began to write about it.

Here Hassan is privileging the acquisition of Knowledge, a la Enlightenment rhetoric. Perhaps if he engaged with postmodernism in a more intuitive way this could be avoided.

This may be because postmodernism has changed, I have changed, the world has changed.

But this is only to confirm Nietzsche’s insight, that if an idea has a history, it is already an interpretation, subject to future revision. What escapes interpretation and reinterpretation is a Platonic Idea or an abstract analytical concept, like a circle or a triangle.

There is no such thing as an abstract concept – no one thinks of circles or triangles in the same way. For example, looking at a circle today, I could conjure up thoughts about infinity and continuity, or I could think of the movie ‘The Ring’ and its use of the circle as a troubling gateway. A circle could represent the globe, a land mass, a pie chart, proof that pi equals 3.14, and so on. Seeking anything that is beyond interpretation is a sign of an intellectual practice too conditioned to Enlightenment ideas.

Romanticism, modernism, postmodernism, however, like humanism or realism, will shift and slide continually with time, particularly in an age of ideological conflict and media hype.

When has there ever been ideological uniformity?

All this has not prevented postmodernism from haunting the discourse of architecture, the arts, the humanities, the social and sometimes even the physical sciences; haunting not only academic but also public speech in business, politics, the media, and entertainment industries; haunting the language of private life styles like postmodern cuisine--just add a dash of raspberry vinegar. Yet no consensus obtains on what postmodernism really means.

Why would you look for one? This is a redundant comment. Perhaps instead of trying to issue a general statement, the author should talk about his personal experiences with postmodernism.

If someone tried to come up with a consensus for 'postmodernism' they would just draw attention to their distinctly individual line of thinking, their unique way of trying to reproduce a common blunder - the search for transcendental truth. Every person comes from a context, and none of the discourses consciously influenced by postmodernism and about postmodernism can be applied universally. Respecting an individual's thought means giving him or her full credit for their creation, not intimating that they have tapped into some kind of 'collective unconscious'.

The term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to what philosophers call an essentially contested category.

Isn’t everything? ‘Postmodernism’ is no more problematic to people searching for definitions than ‘kittens’. It’s just that ‘postmodernism’ is more likely to arouse these kinds of disillusionment with labels because most people do not see ‘kittens’ as problematic. Everything is constantly in flux, and postmodernism is just a word that reminds people of that flux more often than many others.

That is, in plainer language, if you put in a room the main discussants of the concept--say Leslie Fiedler, Charles Jencks, Jean-François Lyotard, Bernard Smith, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, Marjorie Perloff, Linda Hutcheon, and, just to add to the confusion, myself--locked the room and threw away the key, no consensus would emerge between the discussants after a week, but a thin trickle of blood might appear beneath the sill.

I don’t like this suggestion of violence, and I find it particularly offensive since Ihab is suggesting that a group of highly respected intellectuals would be unable to prevent themselves from resorting to bodily harm in the face of opposition. It's not funny.

Let us not despair:

I'm not despairing... why should I? Again, you should own your feelings, not seek to project them onto anyone else. I lament the lack of the pronoun "I" in academic writing.

though we may be unable to define or exorcise the ghost of postmodernism, we can approach it, surprising it from various angles, perhaps teasing it into a partial light. In the process, we may discover a family of words congenial to postmodernism.

Here are some current uses of the term:

1. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Spain), Ashton Raggatt McDougall’s Storey Hall in Melbourne (Australia), and Arata Isozaki’s Tsukuba Center (Japan) are considered examples of postmodern architecture: they depart from the pure angular geometries of the Bauhaus, the minimal steel and glass boxes of Mies van der Rohe, mixing aesthetic and historical elements, flirting with fragments, fantasy, and even kitsch.

2. In a recent encyclical, titled “Fides et Ratio,” Pope John Paul II actually used the word postmodernism to condemn extreme relativism in values and beliefs, acute irony and skepticism toward reason, and the denial of any possibility of truth, human or divine.

3. In cultural studies, a highly politicized field, the term postmodernism is often used in opposition to postcolonialism, the former deemed historically feckless, being unpolitical or, worse, not politically correct.

4. In Pop culture, postmodernism--or PoMo as Yuppies call it insouciantly

I have heard many types of people refer to it as 'PoMo', including myself (and I don't identify as a 'yuppie'). Generalisations, generalisations.

--refers to a wide range of phenomena, from Andy Warhol to Madonna, from the colossal plaster Mona Lisa I saw advertising a pachinko parlor in Tokyo to the giant, cardboard figure of Michelangelo’s David--pink dayglo classes, canary shorts, a camera slung across bare, brawny shoulders--advertising KonTiki Travels in New Zealand.

What do all these have in common? Well, fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, anti-ideological stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp. So, we have begun to build a family of words applying to postmodernism; we have begun to create a context, if not a definition, for it.

Is Ihab suggesting that a universal context for postmodernism may be conjured up? This is just as problematic as a universal definition. His collection of phenomena which has attracted the term 'postmodern' could only have been chosen by him. And if even if someone used the exact same examples, they would have different approaches to each of them.

More impatient or ambitious readers can consult Hans Bertens’ The Idea of the Postmodern, the best and fairest introduction I know to the topic.

But now I must make my second move or feint to approach postmodernism from a different perspective.

More in Part 2!

Ihab Hassan

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I Love Facebook

July 25th 2008 17:25

Not long before I was about to leave for Europe, about two months ago, I received a friend request on Facebook by some guy with an Arabic-sounding name. Clicking on the link, I mulled over the likelihood of this being someone who could hold my interest past three Facebook messages. I admit, I thought that it might be some superficial and/or sleazy guy who added me because of my looks because I'd never heard of him before, and, unfortunately, because I have known people from the Middle East/South Asia to do that on MySpace. Anyway, I decided my chances of being pleasantly startled were pretty low, but hey, what did I know?

Facebook pretty much shows you the person's profile pic, and the network they have elected to belong to when bringing a friend request to your attention. You can then click on their profile from there. The picture paralysed me- a middle-aged-ish man with glasses was giving some unknown person/object a gaze full of speculation, mental alertness and hope. Sure, I sensed a tendency towards authoritarianism as well, but I knew whatever the story would be there, it would be interesting. I glanced over at the network, and did a double take. "Say what?"

It's not that I hadn't expected to find a postmodernist in Egypt... I had even looked up 'postmodernism' and 'Africa' looking for new insights into the continent from its more progressive people not very long ago. I found little to hold my interest, and, disappointed by the copied and pasted email discussions of a group of academics who questioned the point of thinking about 'postmodernism' in relation to Africa at all, I tried to resign myself to a lifetime of perspectives from the West to engage with... just in case. Every postmodern theorist I had ever heard of was based in the West, with most of them hailing from a French of American background... why should my non-expectations about the perpetuation of this trend be non-derailed?

Intrigued, I clicked on Mohammed's profile, and - lo and behold, he had listed 'deconstruction' as one of his interests. I was so surprised I think I may have giggled. Usually the only person who voluntarily brings up deconstruction is me, myself and I. I was getting ready to see the world, and here was a whole new world opening itself up to me over the net (because each person is a universe).

Two months later, Mohammed and I exchange emails, chat to each other on MSN and send each other videos on Facebook. He is doing his phd on feminist literature from Egypt in Al Menya University (that's 4 hours from Cairo), did his master's research on Christian theory, and has published articles on all sorts of topics in his native Arabic. He has also written four books at the relatively young age of 34. He tells me that there are lovely people in Egypt who are interested in his views, and that there are people who are favourably predisposed towards Nietzsche and Derrida (and the boy can spell the name of the German philosopher perfectly every time he mentions him, all other spelling/grammar mistakes aside). He does mention that the ideas he explores in his work often leave him feeling isolated and anxious as a result, and I could blame Egypt's repressive government but the sad thing is that a lot of innovative thinkers I know experience the same thing, myself included. Mohammed has not been outside Egypt, which makes me squirm - I don't know many people who are not immigrants and not part of a multicultural society. But evidently this has not stopped him from appropriating ideas from the West and other places into his own narrative, or prevented him from becoming a radical thinker, feeler and generally a fabulous person.

There are a lot of things I don't know about him, like how far he would push the standards of what is seen as socially acceptable or morally upstanding, considering the government he has to mind, what he would change about the way people treat women if he had the power, and to what extent he engages with agnosticism and pantheism, but I know other things: He 'loves' Derrida, he considers his parents as oblivious to much of what goes on in his head (just like moi), he doesn't think anyone can be too sensitive or think too much, and he hasn't once complained about anything. I think he may be my new best friend. And I can't wait for him to finish his phd in the next year so he can take me up on my marriage proposal, because while for now I'm just interested in screwing around with the institution of marriage for my own (and others') benefit, if he loses that authoritarian streak by way of spending some time in Aus (or wherever), he might be a good catch after all.

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Shades of Europe: Monopoly Will Never Be The Same Again (Discovering London)

July 12th 2008 08:56

My interest in the UK first piqued when I heard it had a significant avant-garde scene, and also a vibrant gay community. After I quit uni I started making friends with intellectuals and academics all around the world, and I met two or three very interesting people from England. There was Ulysses, of Cuban origin, living in London with his Eastern European wife, Viv, an academic from Huddersfield who had published a book on social constructionism in the field of psychology, and Simone, a TV & Film Studies PhD student (now an academic) with an interest in Buffy & Fight Club, residing in Reading. I still keep in touch with Simone, but have lost touch with the other two... anyway, they were hip and cutting edge and challenged my idea of English intellectual life as stagnant and pretentious.

Watching London's bid for the 2012 Olympics, I was surprised to see lots of black people and a vibrant, hip campaign emphasising spontaneous acts of altruistic performance! It was the best video, and I wanted it to win, preconceptions about London being stuffy and righteous momentarily left behind. Watching Love, Actually was another film that made me re-evaluate my perception of modern English culture. Then there's the Sugababes, a multicultural vocalist trio who throw out boppy, harmonised melodies with an off-beat glamour and modern zing

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This blog is banned in Iran!

July 6th 2008 03:02

Woohoo, I must be doing something right... but what could it be? Is it all that talk about homosexuality I've been doing recently that's inspired the censorship bureau to get active(because as you may have heard, according to Ahmadinejad there are no homosexuals in his country)?

I only found this out because I have newly acquired a friend in Iran who tried to access my blog, and thanks to the restrictions of internet materials deemed 'suitable' for Iranian users, she can't do it

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Shades of Europe: London - Sparkling in the Gloom

July 4th 2008 19:07

Note to self: When making the 24 hour or so flight from Sydney to Europe, do not go by way of a location which will be deemed unsatisfactory as a place to spend a night by the people paying for your flight. Such was the unhappy circumstance I found myself in when I arrived exhausted by a 14 hour flight in Abu Dhabi, and could not retreat into the blistering heat of the non-air-conditioned world for some unwinding from the stresses of long-haul travel... I was forced to continue my journey with a 7 hour flight (3 hours of waiting in between) to Heathrow International Airport. My foray into the Middle East (I don't think Istanbul counts?) will have to wait a longer while. But I suppose if I was to smoothly hurtle in the general direction of a locale I could expect to be approaching catatonic in, London was not a bad place for that to be.