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Postmodernism in context, or, grad students on the market

Introductory remarks for PostModerne Diskurse Konferenz (20. November 1998)

Johannes Angermüller

 


Our first objective for organizing this conference is to support the exchange between students on the graduate and postgraduate level. As you may know, Germany is a rather decentralized country. There are few opportunities for younger students to meet and speak about recent trends in the general debate. Also, as compared to most Anglo-American universities, many German departments are smaller and more hierarchically organized, which means that - forgive me this sociological jargon - there seems to be a more significant correlation of age and power.

A second reason is that we’re interested in what’s been happening in some so-called postmodern discourses. Postmodernism has mainly been a debate among American and some British scholars with only few repercussions in Continental academic circles. (In France, postmodernism doesn’t mean a lot either. But I’ll come back to that later.). It is true that nowadays there is a debate on postmodernism in Germany as well, but it has largely been limited to the arts pages in the newspapers. The problem of this debate seems to be that a very American term, postmodernism, has been swiftly taken up as a trendy catchword without taking into account its original context. It may be true that postmodernism is bound to be more of a vague feeling, than a precise term. But translating it from American scholarly journals into German newspapers couldn’t but increase the confusion.

In view of such an ugly term as postmodernism, most German intellectuals spontaneously opted for a kind of splendid isolation vis-a-vis the wave of postmodernism. A carefully selected committee of scholars chaired by Jürgen Habermas was charged with the task of scrutinizing what all that Anglo-French fuss was about. In his The Philosophical Discourse on Modernity a shocking result was revealed to the German public: postmodernism, Habermas’ inquiry report went, was highly infectious and dangerous to the logical capacities of the careless reader. Even worse, there were strong evidence that French postmodernists had a secret fetish for Reagan, Thatcher, even Hitler and other people of that sort. Hence under no circumstances were French ideologies allowed to cross the Rhine.

Habermas’ findings were so alarming that some of his friends are said to have stopped drinking French wine. And when rumors had it in Frankfurt that the British mad-cow syndrome originated in French philosophy departments, a generalized hysteria began to spread. As a reaction, all kinds of defense mechanisms had to be swiftly activated by German intellectuals. As a first measure, one group asserted that postmodernism was ”relativist nihilism” while a second thought it ”nihilist relativism.” Both these fascinating arguments were powerfully reinforced by Frankfurt’s intellectual customs officers. A second strategy was to tirelessly point out that the French lacked a gene - the coherent-writing gene - which causes serious trouble with sentence structure and coherency and these things. As one of the last efforts to put an end to postmodernism, they maintained that postmodernism was nothing new, we’ve had it all, didn’t even Plato already know what postmodernism was about? The last argument was that postmodernism was dead, at least almost.

According to our intellectual customs officers, this last phase began in the mid 80s or so. But their increasingly irritated mood betrays a deep-hidden concern that the whole thing may not be over yet. So the looming shadow of young nihilists breaking out of the Disney theme park near Paris in order to invade literature and philosophy departments continues to haunt the nightmares of the undaunted guardians of truth and reason. With increasing despair, they hear those nihilists mutter curses against logocentrism and Western metaphysics - especially disturbing: their strong French accent. There remains a strong feeling among them that postmodernism is not only something incoherent but also highly indecent, amoral, and dangerous.

In fact, only recently a broader discussion about postmodernism has started in Germany. Nowadays, more and more students are testing their professors’ nerves by asking brain-threatening questions about binary oppositions, technologies of the body, and discursive practices. More and more dissertations on certain Franco-American thinkers get published and trickle down into public discourse. And now there’s a growing suspicion that Germany’s splendid isolation has not been designed to keep you clean from the ever luring impulses of postmodern irrationalism. Rather, the negative reaction against postmodernism may have something to do with the significance of the age-power correlation.

But what is postmodernism?

Post-modernism means: .... ‘after modernism’. This may, indeed, be one of today’s less innovative thoughts. Nevertheless I want to begin by shedding some light on English-American modernism, which served as a backdrop against modernism. Usually, modernism has nothing to do with sociological theories of modernization. Also, modernism should be distinguished from German Moderne, which indicates the period from the enlightenment on. American-English ‘Modernism’, by contrast, designates various avant-gardist artistic movements at the turn of the century, like cubism, futurism, Dada and the like. The common ground of most modernist movements was to shatter older bourgeois aesthetic norms. In many cases, it emphasized the fluid and fragmented character of modern life.

If we compare Anglo-American and Continental modernism, we can see three major differences.

  1. American modernism was a great deal weaker than on the Continent. Indeed, the modernist aesthetic iconoclasm would not have been too meaningful in a country such as the United States, where there was too little history for a stable canon of cultural forms to emerge.
  2. American modernism began some three decades later than in Europe. Its most visible variant in painting, abstract expressionism, e.g., didn’t begin until the 50s.
  3. In political terms, Anglo-American modernism was a lot more conservative than its Russian, French and German counterparts. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, for instance, were anxious to defend the value of the Western tradition as represented by certain English poets of the 18 th century.

Thus modernism in America meant something rather different than on the Continent, and we mustn’t forget that American post-modernism could only be a reaction to American modernism. Architecture, however, might be seen as a special case.

  1. While it was close to global flows of finance capital, it has been a lot more internationalized than highly national cultural forms like painting or literature.
  2. Architecture was the first realm for modernism to disappear. Indeed, the sudden demise of the LeCorbusier’s and Bauhaus’ modernism in the late 60s was a swift and dramatic shift toward a more populist ‘architecture’.

But what about the other arts which are more confined to national borders and cultural traditions?

The academic discourse of postmodernism began in American departments of literature, especially French, Comparative literature, and English in the wake of a deep crisis of American literary criticism in general. But the significant drop of enrollment figures since the late 60s, literature, notwithstanding departments of literature managed to assert their increasingly paradigmatic role in American intellectual life. From the 70s on, young students from new social backgrounds increasingly chose literature and thus accelerated the decline of traditional forms of high cultural capital. In this situation, many American departments of literature reacted in various ways:

  1. The work of Leslie Fiedler and Andreas Huyssen, later Fredric Jameson and John Fiske mark the shift toward ‘low’ forms of cultural capital, i.e. mass culture. This abandonment of elite forms of literature like certain forms of poetry was accompanied by the death of the New Critical paradigm and modernism as represented by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
  2. New groups increasingly begin to dominate the academic discourse as identifiable groups. Democratization and professionalism within academia undermined the positions of the more traditional intellectual mandarins. Frank Lentricchia, e.g., remarks that as late as the early 70s, the academic establishment had been highly suspicious of ‘pigs’, people like him who came from a lower social background.
  3. As a consequence, literature has become more and more politicized and has split up in various discourses, where so-called minorities like women, ethnic and sexual communities actively put forward their political agendas. Thus literature has become a major forum for the articulation of dissatisfaction and resistance.
  4. An important development in the humanities of that time was the emergence of Theory. Theory with a capital T had a very specific meaning in literature: It designated de Man’s blending of literature and philosophy in the wake of Derridean deconstruction. But soon theory encompassed the broad reception of French structuralism and beyond. People like Foucault, Barthes, Lacan, and many others swept over the ocean and thoroughly changed the way literature is done in the United States. And it is during this transatlantic encounter that postmodernism was finally born as a theoretically grounded phenomenon.
  5. The strong turn to theory meant that literary criticism became a kind of avantgardism in its own right. The French input helped redirect the way criticism was done toward ever more radical innovation and experimentation. The theoretical project that thus emerged announced the crisis of representation, signified and the true. Indeed, the structuralist theories imported from France served to transform the most basic underlying assumptions of many American intellectuals.

The two most successful French intellectuals in the America of 70s were Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. They are still considered to be among the most important spokesmen for postmodernism. Yet, when Foucault was asked about postmodernism he became angry and replied that he didn’t even know this term. So we mustn’t forget that in France postmodernism is not a meaningful concept since the French structuralist as well as the so-called poststructuralist theorists who were so eagerly embraced by American critics in the 1970s were all committed to modernism. Derrida, Foucault and Barthes, e.g., wrote about Artaud, Mallarmé, and other distinctively modernist representatives. It’s important to note here that in France there was never such a clear rupture between modernism and postmodernism as it was in America. In France, you just didn’t have to become a postmodernist in order to liberate the play of the signifier, to do away with representationalism and so and so forth. All that had already been in French modernism. Didn’t Picasso invent the collage? Wasn’t Mallarmé as obscure as are some postmodernists today? Wasn’t Roussel and Artaud evidence for the compatibility, even affinity of art and madness? Didn’t Dada unveil a nihilist society?

American modernism had a distinctive reactionary touch, which had come under attack in the 1960s. Especially in the 80s, when the level of political life resembled more and more advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, a right-wing Christian program was no longer exactly promising to the average English professor, who gradually understood that Ollie North could not be countered with Milton and Dickens. As a consequence, the turn to French modernists and their structuralist disciples was felt both as a liberation from American modernism and as an antidote against right-wing fundamentalism.

So I want to suggest that French modernism and structuralism only became postmodernist and poststructuralist by coming to America. Had structuralism stayed in France it would have probably remained modernist for ever. The role it has played in the US is considerably different from that in France, but all transatlantic confusion notwithstanding, it was a major precondition for the emergence of the postmodernist paradigm. The deconstruction of the signified, the crisis of representation, truth, the Same, the death of the author etc. were all subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism. In the American context, it served to liberate a new interpretative subjectivity in the humanities, actually quite alien to structuralist or so called poststructuralist tenets, indeed. And whenever French intellectuals coming from Paris in order to try to get in a word of doubt, they were outvoted with enthusiasm and declared the latest blockbuster in postmodernist theory. Today, committed anti-postmodernists like Pierre Bourdieu and even our Frankfurt customs officer are at times discussed under the rubric of postmodernism because of their interest in language and power, discourse and emancipation.

Postmodernism was born on the ruins of traditional literature. From there, it rapidly spread to other fields such as anthropology, art history, philosophy, geography, nowadays even musicology, adult education and many more. The postmodernist paradigm was a reaction to an older aestheticism underlying the conservative elitism of American modernism. Yet postmodernism has become a lot stronger than modernism ever was. It has become a mass phenomenon, indeed.

Various authors have suggested that the tremendous success of postmodernism in everyday life has something to do with a new stage of capitalism. For David Harvey, postmodernism is a product of the transition from a Fordist-Keynesian period to flexible accumulation. Fredric Jameson has pointed out a third period in capitalism, which is multinational. I, too, think that the tremendous success of postmodernism in the United States should be seen in the context of a changing social environment. Harvey’s and Jameson’s statements need to be qualified somehow, though.

If we consider the academic discussion about postmodernism, it probably wouldn’t be too helpful to refer to Bill Gates or Daimler-Chrysler in terms of causal variables. The reasons for why the humanities turned postmodernist should be found in their more immediate context. Jean Baudrillard’s more recent production may, indeed, indicate that he’s no longer stable and shutting down his system but this does not necessarily mean that he’s paid by the Microsoft Corporation. Nevertheless, it may be justifiably assumed that postmodernism would be impossible without advanced market conditions. In many cases the shift toward postmodernist discourses has been accompanied by a change of the predominant conditions of production within academia. Thus the crisis of the humanities in the 1970s and 1980s accelerated the development of more market-related modes of knowledge production.

The theories now in vague among English professors announce the death of the subject, the crisis of representation, and the disappearance of the referent. And isn’t that exactly a hallmark of advanced capitalism where everything becomes exchangeable so that fixed value standards ‘melt into air’ (Marshall Berman)? As long as four decades ago, Hannah Arendt said about the human condition in modern market economies: "Universal relativity, that a thing exists only in relation to other things, and loss of intrinsic worth, that nothing any longer possesses an "objective" value independent of the ever-changing estimations of supply and demand, are inherent in the very concept of value itself." ( The Human Condition , Chicago, 1958: 166). The loss of all certainty, down to the deepest semiotic levels, is inherent of academic as well as artistic markets. And what has happened to the American humanities since the 1960s is getting closer and closer to what Arendt singled out as a constitutive instability under the conditions of total exchangeability.

Ever since, many American departments of literature and the social sciences have had to adjust to increased competition. Some observers such as Gerald Graff and Wlad Godzich have described this new development as ‘professionalization’. The increased ‘professionalism‘ in the humanities means that academia has finally been adjusted for market requirements: the pressure for productivity has increased, fewer and fewer jobs can be distributed by ‘old boy‘ networks, the publication system has become more and more anonymized, the fate of the producers is highly individualized, there are rapidly changing market demands, and so on and so forth.

So far, Continental academia has largely been spared by the market mode of production. In Germany, too, older paradigms do get obsolete, yet in many cases only after their main representatives have died. But the problem is not so much this or that paradigm. The overall situation could be considerably improved if the question of what we do could be disentangled from who has to pass away in the first place. Thus whether postmodernism or any other new paradigm will make it here will depend on how new problems and trends can be taken up by everybody - whatever his or her position and status. If postmodernism helps us overcome these rather uninteresting questions of life and death, it should be in the best interest of everybody, indeed. Postmodernism as such is not the real issue. It will be truly democratic and liberating only if it really shifts our attention to the question of the conditions under which we want to produce.

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