*Sorry, but I'm afraid that critics will have to empty clip after clip of rounds into the carcass of the thing and it's still gonna squirm.
*Entertaining reading, though. Makes me want to get even more postmodern than I already am.
http://www.outsiderwriters.org/archives/2046
(...)
"Preparing this essay, some months ago, I wrote a letter to twenty of my friends (writers, critics, professors, entertainers) asking them to answer these two questions:
1. Do you think Postmodernism is dead?
2. If so, what killed it?
"To my great delight, all twenty correspondents replied, but all asked not to be identified. These are the twenty answers I received:
1. Postmodernism was an exercise in discontinuity, rupture, break, mutation, transformation, therefore doomed from the beginning …
2. As with all new things, once absorbed by the economy Postmodernism was finished …
3. Now that the effects of Postmodernism are evident in sectors as diverse as dress, food and lodging, and are in those forms understood, the end is not far …
4. Postmodernism began as a genuine if loose literary movement and ended as a department store curiosity …
5. When the academy starts to take sides & quibbles about Postmodernism, it quickly kills what it discusses …
6. In winning the day, Postmodernism, of course, loses …
7. Because Postmodernism was viewed both as a movement and a perfume, and both as an intellectual disposition and a bowl of fruit, it had no chance to survive …
8. Postmodernism as a literary notion was invented to deal with the Holocaust. The prewar split between form and content was incapable of dealing with the moral crisis provoked by the Holocaust, and therefore writers like Beckett, Walter Abish, Ronald Sukenick, Primo Levi, Raymond Federman, Jerzy Kosinski, and many others, invented Postmodernism to search among the dead, to dig into the communal grave, in order to re-animate wasted blood and wasted tears ….. or perhaps simply in order to create something more interesting than death (as Claude Lanzman did in SHOAH, for instance — one of the great Postmodern films).
9. When something completes its intellectual and moral journey it is enshrined within sealed cases in the various Sorbonnes, like the relics of saints, and is venerated in much the same way and with the same use-less result, and so it is with Posmodernism …
10. When among critics the tone of the debate shifts from intellectual to moral, then we know that Postmodernism is dead …
11. The death of anything is, of course, a trope not for its death but for its utility, its applicability. Now Post-modernism no longer avails, no longer applies …
12. When a movement becomes a choice and not a necessity, as Postmodernism has now become, it signifies its death. But since one can never speak one’s death in the present– one’s death can only be spoken by others after it happens — the death of Postmodernism is now being spoken by everyone, everywhere …
13. The central, fundamental literary texts of Postmodernism: Texts For Nothing, The Library of Babel, Cosmicomics, Lost in the Funhouse, The Voice in the Closet. These texts announced and performed the end of Postmodernism while pretending to serve as its beginning …
14. The current reactionary literary climate dominated by works in received forms does not indicate the death of Postmodernism as much as the persistence of the power of market economies to define the arts …
15. Literary fashions have more to do with the reception of literature than with its creation, and therefore more to do with its end than its beginning …
16. While it is true that the current literary scene viewed from a certain perspective looks sterile, it is more true that it is extraordinarily fallow, ready to submit, ready to compromise, in a quiveringly receptive mode. Post-modernism died because it refused to compromise … (...)
(((More:)))
"Here is an inventory of cultural items which have been described as Postmodern. I found that list on page 139 of a collection of essays, just published in England, entitled POSTMODERNISM AND CONTEMPORARY FICTION (edited by Edmund J. Smyth).
"POSTMODERN NOW:
"The décor of a room, the design of a building, the diagesis of a film, the making of a Rock & Roll disk or a MTV video tape, a television commercial or a documentary, the inter-textutal relations between a television commercial and a docu-mentary, the lay-out of a page in a fashion magazine or a critical journal, space capsules, the anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, cold dark matter, the attack on the metaphysics of presence, the general attenuation of feelings in Mankind, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of the post-war generation of Baby-boomers confronting the disillusionment of middle-age, the predicament of reflexivity (but not mentioned the irritation of self-reflexiveness), the stubborness of rhetorical tropes, the proliferation of surfaces, the new phase in commodity fetishism, the fascination for images, codes and styles, political or existential fragmentation, the decentering of the subject, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power formations, the implosion of meaning, the collapse of cultural hierachies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear destruction, the decline of the university, endangered animal species, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturized technologies, the sense of placelessness or the abandonment of placelessness (depending on who you read), etc., etc.
"I skipped a few, and added a few, but the one thing missing from this list is Postmodern fiction, and that is interesting." (...)
