nicholls, peter - divergences modernism, postmodernism, jameson and lyotard

7/28/2019 Nicholls, Peter - Divergences Modernism, Postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard

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PETER NICHOLLS

Divergences: modernism,postmodernism, Jamesonand Lyotard

Is the postmodernism debate finally gr indm g to a halt? M y quest ion isprompted specifically b y theappearance of F rednc Jam eson 's new volum ePostmodernism, or the Cultural Logicof Late CApitalism. I The te rms Jam esonuses here to dis t ingu ish modernism from postm odern ism are certainlyfamiliar ones . W hile pos tmodern ism is identified w ith 'capitalism itself'(p. 343), modernism is seen as respon ding to the incomplete process ofm odernisat io n (p. 310), a set of condit ions w hich a llowed it to ma intain am easu re of cri tical d istance f rom a deve loping consum er culture . W ith theloss of that distance goes hermeneut ic 'depth' and a certain affect; apostmodem cul ture sus ta ined by the globalising tendencies of latecapitalism is, Jameson a rgues once m ore, a predom inantly 'spat ia l ' oneand no longer has room for thethem atics of tim e and m em ory which w ereso important to m odern ism.

The 'retreat' of languageThese ideas are familiar from the 1984 essay with which Jam eson opensthis collection , 2 and in the re m a inde r of the volum e heuses them to stage afuller characterisation of someof the dominant m odes of the postmodem.His a t tention here to newtechnologies of reproduct ion (notably video, butfilm and television a re also considered) gives thew hole account of post-modernism a s tronger develop m en ta l thrustthan i t had before. Now theargument for a fundam e n ta l s tructu ral continuity be tw een modem andpostmodem capitalism (the l ink is m ade, as before, via the w ork of E rnes tM andel) is compl icated b y a pow erful sense o f the deliquescence of h i thertopriv ileged artistic form s. W ith the exception of a long essay on OaudeSimon'sLes Corps conducteurs (a novel publ ished back in 1971), thenew


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2 Critiad Qullrtnly, vol. 33, no. 3(p. 69), so, says Jameson, 'the written text loses its privileged exemplarystatus' (p. 68).As the rather McLuh.anite ring of that last sentence suggests, Jameson'

account of postmodem culture cannot quite detach itself from what he call'the modernist developmental or historical paradigm' (p. 324), with theresult that the only other contemporary writer to elicit enthusiasm iWilliam Gibson, whose 'cyberpunk' fiction Jameson celebrates as 'anexceptional literary realization within a predominantly visual and aurapostmodem production' (p. 38).3 While such unelaborated statementhave become characteristic of Jameson's prose, this one can also beexplained in terms of his preoccupation with spatiality as the feature whichmost effectively differentiates the postmodem from the modem. Gibson'sideas of 'cyberspace' and virtual reality in fact provide an analogue toJameson's own version of Baudrillardian concepts of 'hyperspace' and'simulation'.When it comes to Anglo-American fiction considered more generallythough, Jameson concludes that, in the postmodem period, 'the architecture is generally a great improvement; the novels are much worse' (p. 299)In his lengthy conclusion, some grounds are offered for this summaryview. Here he distinguishes between two main tendencies, leaving thereader for the most part to supply the names of relevant writers: first wehave 'postmodem fantastic historiography', 'Pynchonesque fantasieswhere 'a semblance of historical verisimilitude is vibrated into multiplealternate patterns'.4 This 'making up of unreal history is a substitute for themaking of the real kind', and Jameson concludes that 'The new free playwith the past . . . is obviously equally allergic to the priorities and commitments, let alone the responsibilities, of the various tediously committedkinds of partisan history' (p. 369).I f this seems a slightly odd reading of Pynchon, whose exploration ofsome of Jameson's favourite concepts, such as 'globalism', might haveearned him a better place in the ranking, all becomes clearer when wereach the second category, that of 'spatial historiography'. The privilegedexhibit is (as before) E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, where the priorities of'fantastic historiography' are apparently reversed: 'Here', says Jameson,'the purely fictional intent is underscored and reaffirmed in the productionof imaginary people and events among whom from time to time real-lifeones unexpectedly appear and disappear' (p. 369). That description might


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Divergences: modernism, postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard 3bringing its mix of characters into the same fictional space, and it thereforeseems to Jameson distinctively postmodem in its downplaying of temporality and the processes of (narrative) memory.

This provocatively brief sketch of postmodem fiction derives some of itsmagisterial assurance from Jameson's rigid line of demarcation betweenmodernism and postmodernism. Nowhere is this clearer than in his insistence on the disappearance of memory in the postmodern. In the chapteron video, for example, we learn that 'memory seems to play no role intelevision, commercial or otherwise (or, I am tempted to say, in postmodernism generally) . . .' (p. 71). By the time we reach the book's conclusion, Jameson is a good deal less tentative about this 'structural exclusionof memory', arguing that 'In the postmodern . . . the past itself hasdisappeared (along with the well-known "sense of the past" or historicityand collective memory)' (p. 309).

Perhaps it's just the phrasing here which is problematic- the apocalyptic'has disappeared', which recalls Baudrillard's habitual announcement ofthe 'end' of just about everything- or else it's a matter of what is designated as postmodern and what is not. Either way, it's difficult not toconclude that, for Jameson, postmodem fiction really amounts to not muchmore than 'the tedious autoreferential tabulations of the short-lived AngloAmerican "new novel"' (p. 367). How otherwise to account for what wemight regard as the main strand of recent American fiction - work by ToniMorrison, Robert Coover, Ishmael Reed, Jayne Anne Phillips, Bobbie AnnMason, Don DeLillo (the list could be much longer) - which is distinguishedabove all by precisely its preoccupation with questions of narrative andmemory (the poetics of 'rememory', to use Morrison's word)?With that in mind, we might also want to turn back to modernism tosee how Jameson's categories work there. Once again, the model seemsrestricted in application on at least two grounds: while we know that themodernists were much preoccupied with questions of memory and duration, many of them (particularly those of the prewar continental avantgarde) were also concerned with analogies between writing and paintingand with concepts of simultaneity and visual space. Equally awkward forthe general outlines of Jameson's historiography is the very 'postmodem'enthusiasm with which some of these avant-garde writers and artists - notonly the Italian Futurists, but French writers like Apollinaire and BlaiseCendrars - celebrated the global implications of an expanding consumer


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6 Critiad Qrulrterly, vol. 33, no. 3and its 'other', those objects and events which lie beyond the edge of theclosed systems of language and the perspectival grid. In a critique ofSaussure's theoretically closed linguistic system, predicated on a networkof equivalences and oppositions, Lyotard observes that 'all discourse isprojected in the direction of something which it tries to seize, and that itis incomplete and open, rather as the visual field is partial, limited andextended by a horizon. ' 17 The 'openness' of discourse is procured by theexistence of what Lyotard calls the 'figural' as an element within it. By thisterm he means what Bill Readings succinctly defines as 'the resistant orirreconcilable trace of a space or time that is radically incommensurablewith that of discursive meaning'. 18 Perhaps the clearest example of suchelements within language are shifters, or deictics, words like 'I ' and 'here',whose meanings are produced in the 'event' of language-use rather thanfrom the internal oppositions of discourse. But the figural appears invarious guises across Lyotard's work and can also be constituted by thevisual and spatial nature of a text, by a desire which operates within theplay of meanings, by the nondiscursive engagement of the body's experience, and, in his later writings especially, by the incommensurability oftime frames by which an order of narration is disrupted by the present inwhich the narration takes place. Lyotard's various essays on painting andcinema constantly seek to disclose this 'materiality that cannot be reducedto a meaning or truth' 19I have outlined Lyotard's theory in some detail for two reasons: first,because his account of 'discourse' and 'figure' offers a way of talking aboutdivergent strands in what we conventionally call modernism; and second,because his conception of a postmodern temporality might help to locatethat body of recent writing about which Jameson has said so little. There isthe possibility, too, that Lyotard's anti-linguisticism might free us from thenow tedious cliche of the postmodern as the pure condition of selfreferring signs.It is necessary to emphasise here that discourse and figure are notopposites: Lyotard warns that 'language and its other are inseparable',20that the figural inhllbits the discursive, so it would be pointless to argue thatmodernism is discursive and postmodernism figural,21 or, indeed, thatsome forms of modernism are simply discursive and others simply figural.What I want to suggest is that some forms of modernism exploit internalresistances to signification while others found their project on an assumption of the capacity of literary language to subordinate the sensible to the


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10 Critical Qtulrterly, vol. 33, no. 3of either poet's work, though we might conclude that Baudelaire'spoem points toward writing as proceeding from a position of knowledge,writing for which the external must be interiorised as a value within discourse (the body subjugated to the rule of 'good forms'). I think it can beargued that this version of 'pre-modernism', with its assumption of somekind of psychological unity within the ironic mode, was the one whichcame to govern the procedures of much of Anglo-American modernism(though the acknowledged predecessor tended to be Laforgue rather thanBaudelaire). Again, it is not that the figural is absent from this writing- indeed it is characteristic of imagism and its derivatives (like the Hemingwaystyle) to seek to make the reader 'feel' something which eludes understanding.32 But the agonistics of this particular avant-garde, and the stress itplaces on technique as mastery, testify to an assumption that non-signifyingeffects must be seen to be won from the effort of signification (from the'combat of arrangement', in Pound's phrase33). This agonistics encodeswhat Lyotard would think of as a distinctively 'modern' temporality of thenew as re-transcription (Pound's 'Make it New', for example). EvenPound's 'In a Station of the Metro', one of the few imagist poems to effacethe temporal frame of its original perception, was, as he is careful to explainin an account of the poem's genesis, the product of numerous rewritingsand exercises in reduction after the event (pp. 86-87).With Lyotard's argument in mind, much could be said here of modernism's varying use of the visual arts to provide an analogy with literaryform. In Pound's case, for example, modernist painting and sculptureoffered a way of conceiving of new dynamic structures, where associativeand juxtapositional contexts seemed analogous to the 'organisation offorms' in a visual art moving toward abstraction (p. 92). Pound's emphasisis on form, as the 'composition and symmetry and balance' of structures(p. 98) which might function to order the flux and chaos of modemphenomenal life. Much of Pound's writing on the subject is, like that ofWyndham Lewis, directed against the 'accelerated impressionism' of theItalian Futurists, and his characteristic way of adapting the visual analogythus hinges on what he calls (after Kandinsky) 'a language of form andcolour', producing 'new units of design and new manners of organisation'(p. 93). Pound's use of Kandinsky's Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst is,however, highly selective, and he seizes on the notion of 'form as theoutward expression of inner meaning' but uses it to very different ends.34


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U Critical Qullrterly, vol. 33, no. 3partly motivated by a desire for some pre-discursive order of experience.On the other hand, though, these plays seem also to register Lyotard'spostmodem moment (and well before Artaud- whom Lyotard, incidentally, calls 'European' in his desire to reduce Balinese theatre to a system ofsigns37). We might add to this that Lyotard's idea of the modem as aretranscription of the postmodem also seems implicit in the evolution ofExpressionist theatre which very quickly came to be dominated by theimperatives of narrative and, specifically, by the binding forms of theOedipal plot. Yet even in the more 'modem' phase, plays like Kaiser'sFrom Morn to Midnight are marked by a sort of internal tension, with theclosed circuit of the Oedipal text constantly threatened by the irruption ofthe figural, as the 'excessive' devices of staging and acting threaten thespatial and temporal limits of the narrative. Here 'good form' seemsalways about to mutate into its opposite, to yield something which thestructure cannot contain or speak.38Expressionism, then, might provide some support for Lyobtrd's particular notion of the postmodem. And we should note too how importantthe idea of space is here. For some of these continental modernists, theexample of painting provides not 'a language of colour and form' so muchas a non-semiotic dimension which subverts the order of discourse. Thiswill have to suffice as my example of an 'alternative' model of modernism,though a fuller account might indicate parallels in French literary Cubismand Russian Futurism.Divergences: postmodernismCan we find within contemporary postmodemism any structural parallelsto the kind of divergences I have indicated within the earlier forms ofmodernism? We have it, of course, from Jameson that irony no longerexists in the postmodem, and it is probably true, as Candace Lang hasargued in a more considered discussion of this question, that irony aspredicated on an intentional subject and a master code has been displacedby the ironic condition of textuality itself (a matter of 'surfaces' involvingan unresolved plurality of codes and the non-coincidence of signifier andsignified39) . What I want to suggest here is that in our postmodem we haveirony when the possibility of figural disruption seems to recede - or, to putit another way, that irony becomes a necessary product of that view of the


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14 CritiaU Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3independent enterprise. The end of seduction, the end of difference . . .(p. 47).This thoroughly 'textual' projection is now probably the dominant way

of conceiving of the postmodem and it seems to have some connection tothe earlier 'discursive' moments of modernism which I have alreadysketched. Might Lyotard's theory of the postmodern offer an alternative, away of thinking the relation of discourse and its other which avoids thecircularity and empty 'indifference' of Baudrillard's view? There is,indeed, a body of recent American fiction for which the world and itshistories are not reducible to signification. This is not to argue for somenaive realism against Baudrillard's scepticism, but rather to suggest thatthe spatial model used by Baudrillard and Jameson is closely tied to thesynchronic order of signification, to sign-systems. In contrast, another formof postmodernism has turned its attention very deliberately to questions oftemporality and narrative, and specifically to what Lyotard has called the'event', the singular moment which can be spoken about only after it isover, and which is composed of 'simultaneous and heterogeneous temporalities'.44 The event is, in this sense, a kind of temporal figure which can'tbe incorporated into a dialectic or reduced to a 'meaning' within a historicalnarrative of equivalent other meanings (the time of the history narrated isnot that of the narration itself). Lyotard's most powerful example is, ofcourse, Auschwitz, an event which can't be remembered (as a simplehistorical 'fact') but which can't be forgotten either.

Now if the postmodem is that which registers an 'event', then we certainly do have a postmodem literature whose subject-matter is obsessivelyconcerned with such cataclysmic 'disruptions' , from slavery, through theSecond World War and Vietnam and, no doubt, beyond. And even on aless obviously momentous scale, it often seems that a recognisable worldcan now be explored only by the kind of 'working through' or tmllmnesiswhich Lyotard connects with the postmodern. A passage in GeorgesPerec's Lift: A User's MllnUill might seem to signal this:

. . . he began to think of the tranquil life of things, of crockery chests full ofwood shavings, of cartons of books, of the harsh light of bare bulbs swingingon their wires, of the slow installation of furniture- and objects, of the slowadaptation of the body to space, that whole sum of minute, nonexistent,untellable events . . . all those infinitesimal gestures in which the life of a flatis always most faithfully encapsulated, and which will be upset from time totime by the sudden - unforeseen or ineluctable, ~ or benign. ephemeral


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16 CritictJl Qwzrterly, vol. 33, no. 3modernism, then of late capitalism itself'. Since Jameson has already equatedpostmodenusm with 'capitalism itself' (p. 343) it is cbfficult to gauge the force ofthis distinction. See alsop. 321 for a further commendation of Gibson's work.4 Jameson's terminology here draws on that of Linda Hutcheon see the discussion of 'historiographic metafiction' in her The Polztics of Postmodemzsm(London and New York: Routledge, 1989).5 The reference is to Perry Anderson, 'Modernity and Revolution', New LeftReview, 144 (March-April 1984), p. 105. For an opposite view, see my'Futurism, gender and theones of postmodemity', TextUII.l Practu:e, 3, 2(Summer 1989), pp. 202-21 and 'Consumer Poetics: a French Episode', NewFomllltions, 13 (Spring 1991), pp. 75-90.6 See, for example, Susan Rubin Suleiman, 'Naming and Difference: Reflectionson "Modernism versus Postmodernism" in Ltterature', m Douwe Fokkemaand Hans Bertens (eds.), Approachrng Postmodemzsm (Amsterdam andPhiladelphia: John Benjamins, 1986), pp. 255-70.7 J e a n - F r a n ~ o i s Lyotard, Le Postmodeme explique aux enfants: Comspondance1982-1985 (Paris: Editions G a l i l ~ , 1986), p. 46.8 J e a n - F r a n ~ i s Lyotard, The Postmodem Condttwn: A Report on Knowledge, trans.Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumt (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 1984), p. 79.9 Bill Readings, Introduang Lyotard Art and Polthcs (London and New York:Routledge, 1991), p. xxxii.10 The Postmodem Condition, p. 81.

11 J e a n - F r a n ~ o i s Lyotard, Des disposttifs pulsionnels (1973; Paris: ChristianBourgeois, 1980), pp. 55-6.12 Foreword to Lyotard, The Postmodem Condztwn, pp. xvi-xvri. Cf. Postmod-ernism, p. 60 for a similar sense of Lyotard's desu-e for 'the triumphantreappearance of some new high modernism'.13 Le Postmoderne explUful aux enfants, p 126.14 J. Laplanche and J.-B Pontalis, The lAnguage ofPsychoanalyszs, trans. DonaldNicholson-Smith (London: I


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18 CritiazlQuarterly, vol. 33, no. 340 Jam eson describes postmodemity as 'a w hollytextualw orld ' in'Baudelaire asM odernist andP os tm odem ist ' , inC. H osek andP. Parker (eds.), Lyric Poetry:Beyond theNew Cnticism (Ithaca andLondon: Cornell U niversityPress, 1985),

p. 255.41 D onald Barthelme, 'K ierkegaard U nfair to Schlegel', SixtyStcnies(New York:E. P. D utton , 1982), p. 164. F urther referenceswill begiven inthe text.

42 See M aurice C outu rier and R ~ D urand , Dcmllld &rthe lm e (L ondon andNew York: M ethuen , 1982), pp. 24-32 ,andtheaccount of B arthelm e' sfictioninA lan W ilde, Honz.cms of Assent: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the IronrclmJJgination (B altimore andLondon: Johns H opkins, 1981).

43 Jean Baudrillard , America, trans. Chris Turner(London: V ersoB ooks, 1988),p. 5. Fu rther references will be given inthetext.44 Readings, Introducing Lyotard, p.24.45 G eorges Perec, Ltfe. A User's MJmual, trans . DaVId Bellos (1978; London:Collins Harv ill , 1990), p. 128.46 JayneAnne Phillip s,Msrchine Dmuns (1984; Faber &t Faber, 1985), p.101.47 C om pare Heidegger and 'theJews', t rans A ndreas M ichel and M ark Roberts(M inneapolis: University of M inneso ta Press, 1990), p. 11 for Lyotard 'sevocation of 'A past thatis notpast, that does not hauntthe presen t, inthesense that its absence is felt, would signal itself even in the presen t as aspecter, an absence, w luch does not inhabtt it inthenameof fu ll reality,w hich is not an obje ct of m em ory like som eth ing that might have been

forgottenand mustberem em bered (w ith a view to a "good end", tocorrectknow ledge). I t is thus noteven thereas a "b lank space ," as absence, as terrarncognrta, butit IS thereneverthe less. '


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nicholls, peter - divergences modernism, postmodernism, jameson and lyotard

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