On Ihab Hassan's 'From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context'
July 26th 2008 05:22
Category: No Category
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!
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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