Poststructuralism and Postmodernism

1. Poststructuralism and Postmodernism

2. “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” - Jean Francois Lyotard

3. Jean-François Lyotard has made the concept of globality seem negative and oppressive, rightly so in many cases. For example, in ThePostmodern Condition he develops the concept of the grand narrative, a meta-story which is used to provide a context which gives meaning and legitimation to the actions of a specific culture (Lyotard 1984: 38). Lyotard famously shows how capitalism has corrupted global grand narratives such as speculation (meaning science and the university) and emancipation. For Lyotard, the way to combat grand narratives is through local narratives, meaning narratives "agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation" (66).

4. As Fredric Jameson puts it in his foreword to the English-language translation of the book, Lyotard's work is the revival of an essentially narrative view of 'truth,' and the vitality of small narrative units at work everywhere locally in the present social system, are accompanied by something like a more global or totalizing 'crisis' in the narrative function in general, since, as we have seen, the older master-narratives of legitimation no longer function in the service of scientific research, (Jameson 1984: xi).

5. For Lyotard, meaning is found in local rather than global narratives, as can be seen, for example, in how European organizations of knowledge cannot capture the meaning of African experience, only local knowledge can (Feierman 1995). One mechanism through which local narratives can take place is language games, which Lyotard describes as "a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches – local determinism" (Lyotard 1984: xxiv). Here Lyotard indicates how the local itself is not important as much as the way it foregrounds contingency, fragmentation and heterogeneity (Rojek and Turner 1998).

6. Andrew Motion, Your Postcard Came

7. Linda Hutchenson, The Politics of Postmodernism Postmodernism is a phenomenon whose mode is resolutely contradictory as well as unavoidably political.Postmodernism manifests itself in many fields of cultural endeavor – architecture, literature, photography, film, painting, video, dance, music, and elsewhere. In general terms it takes the form of self-conscious, self- contradictory, self-undermining. Its roots lie in the sphere in which the term ‘postmodern’ first found general usage: architecture. Postmodern’s initial concern is to de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as ‘natural’ (they might even include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism) are in fact ‘cultural’; made by us, not given to us. (12-13)

8. Postmodernism paradoxically manages to legitimize culture (high and mass) even as it subverts it. It is this doubleness that avoids the danger Jameson (1985: 52) sees in the subverting or deconstructing impulse operating alone: that is, the danger (for the critic) of the illusion of critical distance. It is the function of irony in postmodern discourse to posit that critical distance and then undo it. It is also this doubleness that prevents any possible critical urge to ignore or trivialize historical-political questions. As producers or receivers of postmodern art, we are all implicated in the legitimization of our culture. Postmodern art openly investigates the critical possibilities open to art, without denying that its critique is inevitably in the name of its own contradictory ideology. (26) - Hutchinson

9. Drew Milne, ‘Go Figure’ (2003) This imperium’s eagle spreads ancient wings as the saying goes ahem friends Romans and globalists most dextrous ego-surfers of the remotest control say go figure let slip the bristling clusters and gas from each harsh Doric column stabbed long and hard into a ruin of sea and dimpled air most cleaving indeifference over physical features that depict no political borders lost upon spicy chicken wings as claws do special resolutions in pink cartoons nails down tankers the chalk on bord thing and the gas is all for oil, galley slave of this grade class fellow-guzzling petrol

10. from Jacques Derrida, Aporias What was going to be at stake in this word (aporia) was the ‘not knowing where to go.’ It had to be a matter of the onpassage, or rather from the experience of the nonpassage, paralyzing us in this separation in a way that is not necessarily negative: before a door, a threshold, a border, a line, or simply he edge or the approach of the other as such. It should be a matter of what, in sum, appears to block our way or separate us in the very place where it would no longer be possible to constitute a problem, a project, or a projection, that is, at the point where the very project or the problematic task becomes impossible and where we are exposed, absolutely without protection, without problem, and without prothesis, without possible substitution, singularity exposed in our absolute and absolutely naked uniqueness, that is to say, disarmed, delievered to the other, incapable even of sheltering ourselves behind what could still protect the interiority of a secret.

11. The question of knowing what it means ‘to experience the aporia,’ indeed to put into operation the aporia, remains. It is not necessarily a failure or a simple paralysis, but sterile negativity of the impasse. It is neither stopping at it nor overcoming it. (When somone suggests to you a solution for escaping an impasse, you can be almost sure that he is ceasing to understand, assuming that he had understood anything up to that point.) Let us ask: what takes place, what comes to pass with the aporia? Is it possible to undergo or to experience the aporia, the aporia as such? Is it then a question of the aporia as such? Of a scandal arising to suspend a certain viability? Does one then pass through this aporia? Or is one immobilized before the threshold, to the point of having to turn around and seek out another way, the way without method or outlet of a Holzweg or a turning that could turn the aporia – all such possibilities of wandering?

12. Sublime, simulacra, uncanny, bricolage, deconstruction, hyperreality, kitsch, panopticon, pastiche, palimpset, parody

13. But is there really a strange world? Of course. Are there, then, two worlds? Not at all. There is only our own world and it alone is alien to us, intrinsically so by virtue of its lack of mysteries. If only it actually were deranged by invisible powers, if only it were susceptible to real strangeness, perhaps it would seem more like a home to us, and less like an empty room filled with the echoes of this dreadful improvising. To think that we might have found comfort in a world suited to our nature, only to end up in one so resoundingly strange!” ― Thomas Ligotti, Song of a Dead Dreamer

14. In contrast to modernism: “I shall call modern that art which ... presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.” - Jean Francois Lyotard

15. [Postmodernism] consists not in demonstrating that the game works without an object, that the play is set in motion by a central absence, but rather in displaying the object directly, allowing it to make visible its own indifferent and arbitrary character. - Slavoj Zizek, “The Obscene Object of Postmodernity”