The Passing of Postmodernism

A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary

Josh Toth

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781438430362, 9781438430355
• eBook ISBN: 9781438430379
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The Passing of Postmodernism addresses the increasingly prevalent assumption that a period marked by poststructuralism and metafiction has passed and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics. In discussions of various twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, directors, and theorists—from Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek to Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch—Josh Toth demonstrates that a certain utopian spirit persisted within, and actually defined, the postmodern project. Just as modernism was animated by an idealistic belief that it could finally realize the utopia beckoning on the horizon, postmodernism was compelled by an equally utopian belief that it could finally reject the possibility of all such illusory ideals. Toth argues that this specter of an impossible future is and must remain both possible and impossible, a ghostly promise of what is always still to come. Josh Toth teaches literature and critical theory at Grant MacEwan College and is coeditor (with Neil Brooks) of The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism.

CHAPTER ONE

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The Phantom Project Returning

The Passing (On) of the
Still Incomplete Project of Modernity

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself.

—Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

(Marcellus: “What, ha's this thing appear’d againe tonight?” Then: Enter the Ghost, Exit the Ghost, Enter the Ghost, as before). A question of repetition: a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.

—Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx

CONCIERGE: What is it? Will there be more?

RAY: Sir, what you had there is what we refer to as a focused, non-terminal repeating phantasm, or a Class-5 full-roaming vapor. Real nasty one too.

—Ivan Reitman, Ghostbusters

Introduction

“Let's just say it: it's over” (Politics 166). Postmodernism, that is. Or so Linda Hutcheon claims. For Hutcheon, “the postmodern moment has passed, even if its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on—as do those of modernism—in our contemporary twenty-first century world” (Politics 181, my emphasis). Hutcheon's announcement rings—and I imagine this is her intention—like a death knell, the final word. Indeed, the entire epilogue to the second edition of The Politics of Postmodernism reads like an epistemological obituary.¹ Hutcheon employs phrasing that is usually reserved for funerals, or extended periods of mourning: postmodernism has “passed.” Of course, Hutcheon really means “passed” in a temporal sense, that the postmodern moment is now in the past. Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore the metaphysical connotations of “passing.” So, let's just say it: postmodernism is, according to critics like Hutcheon, dead. It has passed. It has, in other words, given up the ghost. Such phrasing, though, resounds with ambiguity, inviting a number of questions: What ghost? Given? Passed on?—where?, to whom? When, or where, did this passing/giving begin? Is this ghost that postmodernism has “given up,” is this thing that has “passed on,” that which Hutcheon claims continues to “live on?” Is it the same thing that lived on after modernism, and therefore lived on (in) postmodernism? This seems to be, then, a question of the paranormal, of possession. What is this thing that lives on, moving from host to host? But I have already generated more questions than I can, at this point, possibly answer. What is important to note, for now, is that the death of postmodernism (like all deaths) can also be viewed as a passing, a giving over of a certain inheritance, that this death (like all deaths) is also a living on, a passing on.

Perhaps the fall of George W. Bush's cynical administration (with its reliance on tenuous truth claims and its blind support of neocolonial capitalism) and the massively popular rise of Barack Obama's overtly “sincere” administration (with its renewed faith in global ethics and transparent communication) finally signals the culmination of a grand epochal transition, but one thing is clear: Hutcheon (in 2002) is already quite late in arriving at the deathbed of postmodernism.² The deathwatch began, one could argue, as early as the mid-1980s. In 1983, the British Journal, Granta, published an issue entitled “Dirty Realism: New Writing in America.” Introduced by Bill Buford, this “new” realism was presented as an initial step beyond the pretensions of postmodernism. This revival of some type of “realism” was further solidified by the American writer Tom Wolfe in his 1989 “literary manifesto for a new social novel.” In fact, by 1989, the demise of postmodernism was, for most, an inevitability. With the First Stuttgart Seminar in Cultural Studies—“The End of Postmodernism: New Directions”—the fate of postmodernism seemed sealed. By the mid-1990s, the phrase “after (or beyond) postmodern” could be found on the cover of any number of critical works.³ In other words, since the end of the 1980s an increasing number of literary critics and theorists have announced, or simply assumed, the end of postmodernism. The race is on to define an emergent period that seems to have arrived after the end of history.

As I suggested above, the critics who participate in this theorization of the end typically highlight a recent shift in contemporary narrative that is marked by the growing dominance of a type of neo-(or, “dirty”)-realism, and by an increased theoretical interest in the issues of community and ethical responsibility. Indeed, the recent shift in stylistic privilege—from ostentatious works of postmodern metafiction to more grounded, or “responsible,” works of neo-realism—seems to echo the recent ethico-political “turn” in critical theory, a turn that is perhaps most obvious in Jacques Derrida's late work on Marxism, friendship, hospitality, and forgiveness. In line with this theoretical turn, and in the wake of postmodernism, a growing body of cultural and literary criticism has dedicated itself to the recovery of various “logocentric” assumptions. The recent collection of essays edited by Jennifer Geddes, Evil after Postmodernism: History, Narratives, Ethics, might stand for the moment as an example of this shift in critical concern.⁴ In terms of narrative production, then (and as I demonstrate in chapter 3), the suggestion we get from those critics and writers who seem to have arrived after postmodernism is that the stylistic elements that have been typically read as emanations of (what most writers and critics now view) as a subversive and nihilistic epistemological trend have been undermined by a new discourse that is no longer overtly concerned with the impossibility of the subject and/or author and the need to avoid a grounded, or situated, commitment to the political. However, as Klaus Stierstorfer points out in his introduction to Beyond Postmodernism: Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture, this return to seemingly prepostmodern ideologies has been somehow tempered by the lessons of postmodernism:

Whether it is the more universal interest in the possible foundations of a general or literary ethics in a world of globalisation, or the more specific and local issues of identities, scholars and writers alike nevertheless continue to find themselves in the dilemma of facing the deconstructive gestures inherent in postmodernist thought while at the same time requiring some common ground on which ethical agreements can be based. Hence some form of referentiality, even some kind of essentialism is called for. (9–10)

In terms of the apparent shift to a type of neo-realism, we might say that some form of mimesis is called for—that is, some type of renewed faith in the possibility of what postmodernism narrative has repeatedly identified as impossible: meaning, truth, representational accuracy. But as Stierstorfer notes, this shift to some type of (what I call in later chapters) “renewalism” is not simply a backlash in response to post-modern narrative production; it is neither a reactionary return to the ethical imperatives of modernism nor a revival of the traditional forms of realism that proliferated in the nineteenth century. Postmodernism, to a certain degree, persists. Consequently, this seemingly progressive movement out of postmodernism is confronted at the outset by two pressing questions: has postmodernism, as Linda Hutcheon claims, finally “passed?”; and, if so, what is or can be after postmodernism? With these increasingly focal questions as a point of departure, I will consider the possibility that, while heralding the close of a moment in cultural and epistemological history, the current discussion ironically highlights the inevitable persistence of postmodernism. That said, I am not interested in arguing simply that what comes after postmodernism remains informed by postmodernism; this is, obviously, and as I demonstrate throughout, the case. I am interested in demonstrating that the current epistemological, or cultural, reconfiguration—a reconfiguration that maintains many postmodern “traits”—betrays the inevitable persistence of what Jacques Derrida might refer to as the “inheritance,” or “specter,” that animated postmodernism in the first place.

Functioning primarily as a cultural critique (or, rather, as a critique of contemporary cultural critique), the following chapters will thus approach the issue of postmodernism's passing in a manner that recalls Jacques Derrida's analysis of Marxism in Specters of Marx. In line with the theoretical mode Derrida assumes in order to locate in both Marxism and deconstruction a past revenant, or ghost, of “emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise” (Specters 89), my study of the death of postmodernism will function as a type of two-pronged “spectro-analysis,” or “spectrology.” What I would like to suggest is that postmodernism (as a privileged epistemological “configuration,” or cultural dominant, encompassing both narrative and theoretical discourse) was haunted by a certain teleological aporia, a promise of the end represented by a type of humanism, a certain faith in historical progress, a sense of justice and/or meaning. The recent critical identification, or attempt to theorize, the end of postmodernism seems to speak to the fact that this aporia, or specter, necessarily continues to persist, even in the wake of the recent abandonment of postmodernism's formal characteristics. A certain necessarily persistent specter—what Fredric Jameson seems to identify as both the “return of the repressed” and the “utopian impulse” in Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and which is ostensibly at work in all epistemological reconfigurations—compels movement, even if that movement is a narrative or theoretical attempt to exorcise what haunts and compels. Still, I do not intend to deny the reality of what we might tentatively refer to as a type of epistemic break with the postmodern; rather, I am interested in the way in which this current “break” recalls, or reenacts, the postmodern break with modernism—that is, the way in which any such break, or epistemic rupture, can be viewed ironically as both complete and partial.

To a certain extent, and in the same way that a work like Jameson's Postmodernism is interested in postmodernism as a unique stage in what is, ultimately, a much larger historical progression, the following discussion is interested in postmodernism and its apparent passing insofar as it is indicative of a certain spectrologically induced pattern of epochal “shifts,” or “breaks.” Postmodernism is viewed here as a unique epistemological configuration that is defined by the way in which it attempts to “deal with” a certain ineffaceable and transhistorical specter. Via a focus on the passing of postmodernism, then, I want to suggest that it is possible to understand cultural shifts in aesthetic and theoretical discourse/production as “epistemological reconfigurations.” Rather than employing a rhetoric of complete epistemic ruptures—that is, a rhetoric of epochal breaks that, à la Foucault, conceives of seismic epistemological upheavals that leave no residual traces of a previous “archive of knowledge”—it is, I would argue, more useful to view each identifiable epochal, or epistemic, shift as another configuration, as another epistemological attempt to deal with a certain persistent and ineffaceable specter, a certain persistent and ineffaceable teleological aporia. From this perspective, an epoch remains understandably definable (or, perhaps, to a certain degree, synchronically exclusive) while also remaining quite understandably partial, an inevitable continuation of the past. Each epistemic break is always, or only, a reconfiguration because its formation is necessarily contingent upon the fact that something (a specter) always and necessarily passes on. Of course, before we can attempt to relocate this specter in the current, or emergent, period after postmodernism, it is necessary to first locate it within the postmodern itself. For this reason, each of the following chapters begins by first establishing the specter's (non)presence in canonical works of postmodern theory and narrative. Only by first observing the specter at work in postmodernism can we begin to map its trajectory across the “great epistemological divide” that defines this epoch that has arrived after postmodernism.

However, in order to establish the exact theoretical framework that will inform the subsequent discussion, it is necessary to inspect, or spectro-analyze, the original theorization of what we have come to accept as postmodern. In what ways was the theorization of the term “postmodern” influenced by the very specter I propose to locate and relocate? In what ways does the logic of the original postmodern debate inevitably realize, or announce, this specter? This chapter functions as a spectrological recuperation of that debate. By re-approaching a number of the significant “accounts” of postmodernism, my goal is to track the specter in question through as well as in a number of different perspectives, or theoretical positions. So, while it may at times look the part, what follows is not simply or only a review of what has come before concerning the problem of postmodernism and historical shifts. My purpose in the following sections is to provide, rather, a type of “spectral genealogy” of the various attempts to theorize postmodernism. By locating the ostensible specter of postmodernism within the various and seemingly conflicting theories articulated about and during the postmodern period, this genealogy should go a long way in terms of establishing the fact that a specific spectral impulse effects certain recurring discursive formulations in a given episteme. What follows is thus both a cursive survey of the postmodern debate (as it occurred within, and as an effect of, the postmodern episteme) as well as an articulation, and initial employment of, the spectrological framework that will inform the following chapters.

Before I begin, though, a final word on method. While I am interested in the discussion surrounding, and the reality of, a “postmodern break,” this is not an attempt to finalize the debate concerning that break, or shift; I am not concerned here with definitive dates marking the beginning or the end of postmodernism. Obviously, dates will be important to any discussion of historical periodizations—and I will certainly make suggestions concerning the moments of reconfiguration here discussed—but this is an attempt to theorize the way in which the general concept of such ruptures is undermined by a specific spectral persistence. Ultimately, I am not interested in the exact moments of epistemological change. As I explain below, these epistemological configurations seem to recede gradually as new and emergent configurations become dominant. In other words, the spectral reconfigurations identified in the following pages are better understood via Raymond Williams’ concept of residual, emergent, and dominant periods than they are via the Foucaultian sense of spatially conceived epistemes that exist entirely independent of one another.⁵ The specter I propose to examine can be said to persist simultaneously in several distinct epistemological configurations (although, at any given time, a specific epistemic configuration might be in a position of “dominance”). This will make more sense as we move, finally, into a discussion of the postmodern debate as it occurred up to postmodernism's apparent end.

Ruptures and Specters

Employed loosely in Arnold Toynbee's multivolume Study of History (eight volumes of which were published between 1934 and 1954), the term “postmodern,” written “post-Modern,” was used to describe a late-nineteenth-century epochal shift: the end of a “modern” bourgeois ruling class and the growing dominance of an industrial working class. I do not wish to get lost in the early history of the term, but Toynbee's initial theorizing of a “post-Modern” period of Western civilization is a useful point of departure; it inaugurates a long tradition of viewing the postmodern as an ultimately unsuccessful break with the motivating assumptions of (a) modernity. According to Perry Anderson in The Origins of Postmodernity (perhaps the most recent and most comprehensive history of the term), Toynbee “was scathing of the hubristic illusions of the late imperial West” (6), which saw the culmination of the Victorian period as the end of history itself. For Toynbee, “the Modern Age of Western history had been wound up only to inaugurate a post-Modern Age pregnant with imminent experiences that were to be at least as tragic as any tragedies yet on record” (Vol. 9, 421). The Western world—which, for Toynbee, primarily included France, Britain, Germany, and America—had come to believe that “a sane, safe, satisfactory Modern life had miraculously come to stay as a timeless present. ‘History is now at an end’ was the inaudible slogan of the celebrations of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in A.D. 1887” (421). What is interesting about Toynbee's discussion of a post-Modern period is his willingness to chastise the assumptions of such a period. Toynbee ultimately demonstrates that the very conception of an “end of history” is ironically animated by a desire for an as yet unrealized end of history. The end of history is only possible, Toynbee seems to suggest (in a manner that will echo in the following discussion of Derridean spectrality), because it is never fully actualized in any real sense. As Toynbee points out, the desire for an end of history necessarily persisted even as the Western ruling class announced, or assumed, the arrival of a finally posthistoric epoch:

German, British, and North American bourgeoisie were nursing national grievances and national aspirations which did not permit them to acquiesce in a comfortable belief that “History” was “at an end”; indeed they could not have continued, as they did continue, to keep alight the flickering flame of a forlorn hope if they had succumbed to a Weltanschauung which, for them, would have spelled, not security, but despair. (423)

A far cry from the current, now virtually institutionalized, parameters of the term, Toynbee's concept of a post-Modern introduces an issue that has never ceased to inform the modern/postmodern debate: the issue of historical breaks and the culmination of history itself. Toynbee seems to anticipate the recent claim that postmodernism has been as unsuccessful as modernism in terms of heralding, or representing, a final break with the past. Of course, Toynbee's modern/postmodern periodizations are essentially equivalent to what literary critics conventionally identify as Victorian/modern (or what, in economic terms, someone like Jameson, following Ernest Mandel, might associate with market/monopoly stages of capitalism). After all, Toynbee marks the postmodern epoch as beginning with the Franco-Prussian war. Nevertheless, his discussion of a post-Modern is of considerable interest. The attempt to theorize a postcontemporary moment that is, in some regard, an unsuccessful or incomplete break with the ideology of a past moder...

Table of contents

• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Phantom Project Returning
• 2. Spectral Circumventions (of the Specter)
• 3. Writing of the Ghost (Again)
• Notes
• Works Cited