POSTMODERNISM
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What do I mean by "postmodernism"? No sound-bytes here: pomo is notoriously difficult to pin down, and many of its aspects seem to contradict each other. In "SLIP PAGE: Angela Carter, In/Out/In the Post-Modern Nexus", Robert Rawdon Wilson outlines the problems with the term "postmodern". He distinguishes two ‘archives’ of critical analysis, one that defines it as a period, one as a style. As a period term, he writes, "it has proved depressingly not to be ‘straight-forwardly chronological’ but always displaying itself in remote times, embarressingly out of synch with its period-founded definition(s)... This archive inspires analyses that slip towards reification, granting to ‘postmodern’ a unitary hanging-togetherness that one would no longer cheerfully accord to, say, "Renaissance"." (111-2) This is Frederic Jameson’s approach, when he writes "It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place" (xii). (I dispute this.)
As a term denoting style, Wilson continues, "post-modernism does more or less the same conceptual work that another term, "metafiction" performs... and thus invites one, in Quine’s phrase, to "cast about for a distinction"." (114) Ihab Hassan is in this archive, with his eleven catenas of postmodernism. Unlike Wilson, he does not expect its traits and techniques to be mutually exclusive: "traits may overlap, conflict, antecede, or supersede themselves" (Hassan, 504). Having accused the period-archive of needing postmodernism to be "mapped in fairly stark colours with large, heavily marked (though perhaps wholly illusive) boundaries" (Wilson, 113), Wilson seems to expect it to be an equally immaculate style-sheet.
Wilson then resolves the problem of definitions by "confronting" postmodernism as an "educational challenge". He goes on to say that "Postmodernism is a paradigm-case of the problems of boundaries and slipping categories: collapsing borders, fuzzy sets and unmappable zones." (115) This sleight of hand and the subsequent "Postmodernism is" leaves one with the impression that Wilson might perhaps know what he understands by postmodern, but we certainly don’t.
I have not explored Wilson’s argument in order to show him up cruelly: his analysis of the two ‘archives’ is an intelligent and useful entrance point into the treacherous marsh of postmodern theory. Rather, this example shows how unfit our theoretical tools are when it comes to this... thing that we call postmodernism. Definitions become a mockery, boundaries a hopeless and thankless task, and arguments circle and undermine themselves. I believe, however, that if we learn the lessons that postmodern theory teaches, we can both discover and accept a broad definition of it.
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Postmodernism
Jung's Alchemy
Western World & The Individual
Hypertext Fiction
Process of Transformation