r Approaching Post-Modernism Issues of Culture and Technology I ROB NIXON That post-modernism has largely been ignored both by the English Departments at South African universities and by their critics on the left, is hardly surprising. After all, from a conservative 'lit. crit.1 perspective, post-modernist texts are seen as super- ficial, capricious and nihilistic, as poor material for sustained textual scrutiny, and generally quite out of keeping with the humanist spirit of the discipline. On the other hand, from the perspective of the left, the same writing appears elitist, reac- tionary, politically effete and supremely irrelevant. I shall contest, however, that post-modernism does have a place -- and an urgent one at that -- in English Department curricula, but only if we redefine the term itself and the context in which it is to be studied, thereby using it as an occasion for venturing well beyond the garrison of the isolated text. For in essence, the high liter- ature of post-modernism is only one manifestation of that techno- logical imagination which has spread with the administered cul- ture of post-industrial capital, and as such, any discussion of it should be grounded in an understanding of the quietly coercive apparatuses working to homogenize culture in both the West and the Third World. Post-modernism is, then, a specific cultural moment, one in which terms like 'scientific development', 'tech- nological advancement', 'professionalism', 'progress' and 'modern- ization', masquarade as politically neutral (i.e. non-interfering) and as culturally and economically to the unequivocal advantage of any society. Terms such as these help to market a surrogate revolution; and just how surrogate is disclosed by the polemic of the Utopian technophiles: the comprehensive introduction of automation everywhere around the earth will free man fsicj from being an auto- mation and will generate so fast a mastery and multipli- cation of energy wealth by huaanity that we will be able to support all of humanity in ever greater physical and economic success anywhere around his little spaceship On a political level, what this kind of assertion masks is who Outlcat Mti Vol 3 No 2 7984 25 exactly sits at the controls of the meta-spaceship and, on a cul- tural level, it conceals how, in Stanley Aronowitz' words, through "the dissemination of industrialized entertainment the capacity of persons to produce their own culture in the widest meaning of the term has become restricted"2. Convinced that all cultural forma- tions are tightly fused to the distribution of power in society, I shall argue that the only adequate approach to post-modernism is one that embraces a broader notion of the term and, proceeding via the vigorous debate on the role of the culture industry, shuns any purely formalist account or any derived solely from a genealogy of belles lettres. The concept of post-modernism first gained prominence in 1959 and 1960 through two seminal essays -- Irving Howe's "Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction" and Harry Levin's "What Was Modernism?" -- both obituary pieces commemorating the passing of the literary season of high modernism3. For Howe and Levin (as later for Frank Kermode1*) , the 'post' in post-modernism was to be read as a mark of decline,not transcendence, as a falling off from what Levin described as the "uncompromising intellectuality" of high modern- ism5. Certain other critics — Leslie Fiedler, Susan Sontag and Ihab Hassan amongst them -- took the opposing view and began in the sixties to acclaim those authors who spawned the modernist perception of the writer as the high priest in the iancta ianc- toAum of Art. Above all, it was Leslie Fiedler who became the great champion of popular culture, seeing popularity as a much safer guage of importance than the old modernist standards of difficulty and 'profundity', Fiedler began, too, to promote that blurring of the distinctions between high and low culture which was already discernible in the writings of Alan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs ei a£6. If the crumbling of the barriers separating high from low culture was regarded by some left-leaning critics as a positive symptom of the post-modernist era, for others on the left it gave cause for alarm. Fiedler recognised that the source of the latter group's anxiety was its conviction that the culture industry had come to dominate the realm of the popular and threatened to ap- propriate to itself the entire domain of art. In the face of his opponents' criticisms, Fiedler continued to insist that popu- lar culture be given its due and that if indeed it is "exploited for profit in a commercial society, mass-produced by nameless col- laborators, standardized and debased, that fact is of secondary importance"7. But the question of manipulation is not so easily spirited away, Fiedler's admonishment of critics for not taking low culture seriously is founded on a conviction that its demo- cratic value outweighs any reactionary effect it may have through an unwitting subservience to the motives of a profiteering elite. Yet in Fiedler's kind of argument it is very easy for an ambiguous notion to creep in, so that what begins as a warning against un- derestimating the importance of low culture may lead to the toler- ance or even acclaim of very reactionary, manipulated elements (eg. TV soap operas, Su.pe.nman comics) in it, ignoring their lamentable social consequences. If the post-modernist age is, in Walter Benjamin's celebrated phrase, the age of mechanical reproduction pal excef-tenee, the suspicion may well be aroused that much purportedly popular art, far from being the property of the people, is instead a manipu- Aitfi Vol 3 No Z 1984 26 lative tool of the culture industry for creating sham collectives through highly regulated discourses aimed at generating and tra- ding in desires. This suspicion found its fullest expression in the writings of Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Theodore Adorno of the Frankfurt School, all of whom were highly sceptical of popularity as any guarantor of value in a technological society! Especially to Adorno, mass art (his preferred term) seemed fertile ground for totalitarianism rather than democracy, and the only way for an artist to break out of the circle of manipulation was through an aesthetics of pure negativity. According to this view, the work of art had to be turned in on itself as never before so it would become a "windowless monad" that could not be reified into an aesthetic commodity9. Such a work would be paradoxically oppositional, by being useful in its very uselessness: "refrain- ing from praxis, art becomes the schema of social praxis"10. That is, for Adorno, the most social art in a technological-consumer age is an art which breaks all social ties. But this is an un- duly idealist and ascetic solution. For where Fiedler's position may be weakened by an uncritical servility before all popular taste, Adorno's stance suffers from precisely the opposite disa- bility: it ignores the need for gratification, without which no artist can lure an audience. One cannot counter the vices of technology by denying oneself an audience, for clearly no book can take effect until it is read, no music until it is heard. Aside from the issue of gratification, there is a further reason to be sceptical of Adorno's programme for a simultaneously oppos- itional and autonomous art. The problem is one which has shadow- ed avant-gardes throughout the century: how can one ensure that subversive art is not co-opted by the itatu.A-quo'! In Adorno's case, the question becomes more specific: how can a non-instru- mental art secure its autonomy in the face of an omnivorous cul- ture industry? When he envisages artists opposing the administer- ed culture of late capitalism with new, non-habitual forms, Adorno sorely underestimates the extent to which the consumer society is hospitable to rapid change and even has a vested interest in it. In advocating an art that defamiliarises experience, he takes in- sufficient account of the way capitalism itself works by disrup- tion, of the way advertising and television are both bent on dis- traction, so that the aesthetic of estrangement can be co-opted and rapidly put to work by the system. After all, we live in an era in which the dominant tradition is that of rapid replacement: novelty is the very staple of the consumer society and rapidly becomes its excrement. To realise just how comfortably avant- gardes have been assimilated by the culture industry, one has only to reflect on the pervasiveness of visual montage and sur- realist techniques in advertising, on the rapidity with which the very latest line in abstract art appears in corporate lobbies, or on the success of Schoenberg's epigones in the service of Hollywood. Kafka's parable of the leopards in the temple des- cribes the scenario perfectly: Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and becomes part of the ceremony11. Avant-garde irruptions into the sacred realm of established art have, by this late stage in the century, certainly become a pre- dictable aesthetic tradition and one well-adjusted to the re- Afcti Vol 3 No 2 79*4 27 peated economic cycles of invention, reproduction, consumption and disposal. Hence Adorno's segregation of an autonomous high culture from a degraded and dependent mass culture cannot finally be upheld. For purely negative art, too, is likely to be drawn into the cycles of permissive consumerism and to ride, in comp- licity, on the merry-go-round of post-industrial capitalism. The status of Adorno's work on aesthetics is ultimately ambiguous because, despite its neo-Marxist origins, it unfortunately pro- vided certain conservative avant-gardists of the '60s and '70s with a powerful theoretical legitimation. Yet Adorno remains such a key figure in the post-modernist debate because he theo- rised extensively on two of the main cultural phenomena of the period: the sudden ascent of technological art forms with an un- precedented social reach, and the development of increasingly her- metic and autotelic forms of high culture by artists reconciled to tiny elitist audiences. It is to this latter phenomenon that we now turn. Again and again in reactionary circles, post-modernism is defined in purely formal terms, with the work of artists like John Cage and 0 Messiaen, Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, Samuel Beckett and Alan Robbe-Grillet serving as touchstones. Only high art is considered and the emphasis is predominantly on chronicling changes in style, Christopher Butler, in A^-te* the Wake., exemp- lifies this strain of post-modernist criticism. Declaring his indifference to "sociological questions", he asserts: "I have not attempted to give a comprehensive or chronological account of experimental art, and have preferred to concentrate upon a limited number of essentially technical and aesthetic changes by which major contemporary artists freed themselves from the assump- tions of modernism"12. By restricting himself to artistic lineages, that is, by cordoning off aesthetic from larger cultural concerns, Butler enfeebles his analysis of high post-modernism, robbing it of much of its explanetary potential. To gauge further the limitations of purely formalist approaches to the subject, one need only consider the standard fare in cour- ses on literary post-modernism at American and French universities: William Gass, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Robert Coover, Richard Sukenick, Donald Barthelme, Samuel Beckett, Julio Cortezaar, Phillipe Sollers, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Italo Calvino, The usual tack is to look for family resem- blances amongst the members of this pantheon, by tracing the literary ancestry of their texts back through modernism (and per- haps romanticism), showing how they take the modernist project through to its logical conclusions by realising its unfulfilled promises or exposing its incipient failings (depending on one's perspective) , The most familiar of these developments from modernism through to post modernism can be charted as in the box on the next page, Important as it is to record such changes, it is even more essen- tial to uncover what any such purely belletristic genealogy of post modernism conceals. For by insisting that Robbe-Grillet and company are the rightful heirs to modernism, critics obscure the true status of the so-called post-modernists, who are nothing more than a minority group whose writings are symptomatic but certainly hvti Vol 3 No 2 J9«4 28 not representative of the current epoch. Even in the realm of high literature, the bulk of contemporary writing shows few, if any, of the supposed hallmarks of post-modernism. Again, this returns us to the problem of regarding post-modernism as an aes- thetic style rather than as part of a cultural and economic moment: too often the terms 'post-modernist' (in its narrow sense) and 'contemporary' are treated as synomyms. How else could a few references to the nihilism of Barth and Beckett be consid- ered sufficient to demonstrate that literature has finally ex- hausted itself, whereas in truth all that can be claimed is that a certain limited lineage of contemporary culture has begun to peter out? s MODERNISM POST-MODERNISM 1) Cult of the estranged and Death of the author aloof artist 2) Open-ended forms 3) Use of myth or symbol for formal coherence 4) Obsession with iconclasm; tradition jettisoned 5) Reduced reference to material, historical world; shift in in- terest to inner, psychological activities Severly fragmented or decentred forms; collage/montage ; found forms No overarching formal structures; de- liberately transparent or superficial forms Literature of exhaustion; hopeless- ness of breaking the already broken Self-reference; the circles of lan- guage and fiction as ineluctable; extreme narcissim 6) Art for art' s sake Anti-art for anti-art' s sake 7) Pathos of subjective memory 8) Hostility towards technology Total enclosure in the present un- folding of the text; a withered sense of any past or future Submission to technology; tion of mechanical forms imita- Magic realism is one of the most significant strains of recent high literature excluded by the narrow definition, of post-modern- ism: writers like Alejo Carpenter, Gabriel Garci'a Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Salman Rushdie, far from avoiding social content, have developed a fantastic node that addresses issues of history and community directly, particularly the emergence of hybrid sym- bolic systems as the Third World is drawn into the whirlpool of multinational capital and permissive consumerism. Any use of the term post-modernism to confer a false symmetry on contemporary literature -- implying that writers are typically playing end- games or lost in the funhouse — also suppresses a whole category of recent fictions that confront the power of radio, film, tele- vision, and the gutter press to shape and orchestrate subjectivi- ties in an age of mechanical reproduction. Here I'm thinking of works like Manuel Puig's He.a)vtb/ie.ak Tango, Be.ttayed by Rita. Hay- wolth, and The. Kin oj the. Spldtn.vioma.n, Luis Rafael Sanchez's Macho Comacho'i Beai, Mario Vargas Llosa's hunt Julia, and the. Sc/iiptmite.1, and Heinrich Bail's Loit HonotiK o£ Kathzilna Blom, all of which connect with everyday life by staging the psycholo- gical and social consequences of unremitting exposure to the media. The narrow definition of post-modernism t r i e s, like a corset, to streamline the body of contemporary culture which, however, re- fuses to be held in by any single aesthetic theory. I have sug- gested that a rigid, formalist approach distorts high literature and, even more damagingly, cordons it off from other interrelated cultural phenomena. Instead of pursuing some phantom uniformity, c r i t i cs need to acknowledge the diversity of the cultural moment and attempt to explain i t. At the most general level, this div- ersity has i ts source in "that ultimate transformation of late monopoly capitalism variously known as the iocii££ de coniommatlon or as post-industrial society", a form of society which creates an illusory sense of plenitude by disrupting traditional image sys- tems, and dispersing in their stead a glut of transitory images with no obvious relation to any coherent whole13. ally in the Third World, the result is an expansion of consumer choices in lieu of real political ones), Plainly, i t 's not that the cultural t o t a l i ty doesn't exist, but rather that -- because of a growing specialization of knowledge and the media's ability to repress and fracture information, foreshorten memory, and al- ter norms of concentration — the average person is less and less capable of perceiving the whole. So paradoxically, in the very era when the power to produce and distribute images has become more centralised than ever, Western cultures appear increasingly fragmented and incomprehensible from within. The enormous psycho- logical consequences of this paradox have been intuited by John Ashberry in "Definition in Blue", one of the most commanding evo- cations of the post-industrial era: (Often, especi- The rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism And the individual is dominant until the close of the nineteenth century In our own time, mass practices have sought to submerge the personality By ignoring i t, which has caused it instead to branch out in a ll directions Far from the permanent tug that used to be i ts notion of "home". These different impetuses are received from everywhere And are as instantly snapped back, hitting through the cold atmosphere In one steady, intense line. There is no remedy f or this "packaging" which has supplanted the old sensations. Each new diversion adds i ts accurate touch to the ensemble, and so A portrait, smooth as glass, is built up out of multiple corrections And it has no relation to the space or time in which it was lived*. What Ashberry is describing is a new mode of subjectivity, one shaped to an unprecedented degree by commodity fetishism, that i s, by the way reproduced images or objects conceal all traces of their real origins in human relations. The process is mys- CivUlcat Anti Vol 3 Ho 2 19S4 30 tifying and dehumanising: the individual is subjected to a bar- rage of mass practices that create a bricolage of contingent, free- floating, but intensely immediate sensations, serving to divert him or her from any comprehension of the whole. Both the under- standing and the will are thwarted so that the consumer-subject becomes, in effect, part of the realm of the already coded -- what Ashberry calls the "packaging". The result is a form of social amnesia and inertia not unlike the Lacanian description of schizophrenia in which: the only verbal operations available . . . are those in- volved in the contemplation of material signifiers in a present which is unable to hold onto past and future. Each signifier thus becomes a perpetual present, an island or enclave in time, succeeded by a new present which emerges equally in the void, with no links to anything that preceded it, or any project to come15. In short, the post-industrial era has witnessed the splintering of perception and a coeval splintering of the subject itself. For the student of post-modernism, this development poses the problem of achieving an overview of the culture; but although the problem has reached a new intensity, in itself it is not entirely new, as the altered modes of consciousness and perception are only the latest phase of a longer process whereby, in Lukacs' words, "the specialization of skills has led to the destruction of every im- age of the whole"16, Lukacs' phrase is worth pondering, for it re- fers as pointedly to the division of intellectual labour as it does to any specialization in industrial labour; and today, the fine mesh of academic disciplines -- together with the gaps be- tween them -- certainly plays its part in breaking up any compre- hensive image of culture as an entire way of life. One thing is certain: the problem of achieving an overview will not be sur- mounted as long as low culture is kept in quarantine so that aca- demic discussions of high culture may proceed uncontaminated. In trying to overcome this destructive elitism, we can take our cue from Fredric Jameson who, with lapidary insight, has argued that high and low culture must be seen in harness, as dialectically independent phenomena, each affecting the development of the other, rather than as rival claimants competing in "some timeless realm of absolute aesthetic judgement"17. If we assume Jameson's stance, our tasks as critics of post-modernist culture become fourfold: to examine how aesthetic value is socially contested; to guage how developments in high and low culture influence each other dialectically; to study the emergence of hybrid forms which, in terms of audience, style and function, are not readily classifiable as either high or low but seem rather to serve as a bridgehead between the two18, and finally, to investigate ways of intervening strategically in the politics of contemporary culture. To Jameson's insistence that we take seriously the dialectics be- tween the two poles of culture, we must add the need to distin- guish between two components within low culture, between those banausic mass forms that create a specious sense of community, and the more authentic communality of popular culture which has its source in the proletarian public space. For Adorno was surely correct to assert that "the consensus which mass culture propagates strengthens the blind, opaque authority"; by contrast, popular culture proper has the capacity to be truly counter- OdtluxL kvti Vol $ Ho Z 19U 31 hegemonic19. On this score, Adorno was certainly closer to the mark than his contemporaries Brecht and Benjamin, whose faith in the revolutionary potential of technological forms was Utopian and -- at the very least -- premature: witness the l e f t 's repea- ted failure to wrest control of the mass media from the official culture, German fascism and the American culture industry being the two most telling instances of t h i s. In striving for a conception of post-modernism at once more el- astic and possessing greater explanetary power, our goal should be nothing less than an understanding of the nexus of high, mass, and popular cultures and their relation to the economic moment. To achieve t h i s, it is essential to dispute the academic cartog- raphy of the cultural field and to recognise that if literature is cordoned off from the other facets of culture, we will be left with a very etiolated sense of post-modernism. After a l l, literature holds no more than a subaltern's rank in an era se- curely under the command of the moving image; as Sola Pool re- minds us, "it is the mass media . .. which make what should other- wise be wistful dreams of a few modernizers into the dynamic as- pirations of a whole people"20. It is in the context of such pre-fabricated aspirations that we need to scrutinize the various hegemonic guises for persuading people to become unwitting accomplices in their own exploitation. In South Africa, where high culture is spread thin, where popu- lar culture s t i ll runs deep, and where mass culture has made for- bidding inroads, the scrutiny of hegemony entails an understan- ding of the regional distinctiveness of culture but also, and increasingly, i ts connection to the way transnational -- or per- haps we should call it corporate -- culture operates. And if we seek any further reminder that the issues of post-modernist cul- ture and post-industrial economics are inextricably bound and that it is fully time to enter into debate with technology, we need only attend to the sardonic words of American performance a r t i s t, Laurie Anderson: Our plan is to drop a lot of odd objects onto your coun- try from the a i r. And some of these objects will be use- ful. And some of them will just be . .. odd. Proving that these oddities were produced by a people free enough to think of making them in the first place. The United States helps, not harms, developing nations by using their natural resources and raw materials21. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. "Television levels out the classes by reuniting employers and em- Buckminster Fuller, R. 1969: Utopia, o\ Obtiv-uon: The Pio&pzat £OH. Humanity. Bantam, New York, p. 362. Cf. this elated description of television's potential f or defusing class confrontation, taken from an editorial in the conservative Chilean newspaper, Bt HvuuvUo, 18 May, 1972: ployees in the same c i r c u i t, since these persons r o ll with the same sort of laughter at the same exploits or receive the same information burning with actuality. Europeans, Asians, North and South Americans, Africans, or Australians can feel the same emotions at the same time . .. The old individualism of the French revolution f a l ls before the weight of the super-collectivisa of the technological revolution". Quoted in Mattel- a r t, A. 1978: "The Nature of Communications Practice in a Dependent OuiUcuU AVU Vol 3 No 2 79*4 32 Society", Latin American Vet&pectiveA, No 16, p. 24 2. Aronowitz, S. 1981: The Ct^s-w In HUtoiical HateJUallkm. Praener, New York, p. 235 3. Howe, I. 1959: "Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction", PatitUan Rzv-ieiv, No 26, pp. 420-436; Levin, H. 1960: "What is Modernism?" Reprinted in Keitactioni, 1966, OUP, New York, pp. 271-292 See Part Two of Frank Kermode's ContimUtiei. 1968 Random House, New York, 4. 5. Levin, op. dt. p. 292 6. See Fiedler, L. 1977: 7. ReadeA. Stein and Day, New York, pp. 270-294 Fiedler, L. 1972: Twentieth Centwu/ C>utitM,m. Longman, London, p. 458 "The Middle Against Both Ends" in Lodge, D. (ed.): "Cross the Border— Close the Gap" in A VleAtex 8. More recently, the cultural insights of the Frankfurt School have been taken up and developed (generally from a more semiotic and Lacanian per- spective) by the TeJL Quel group in post-'68 France. A Frankfurt School slant is evident, for example, in Julia Kristeva's insistence that in a post-modernist era, writing itself must be "suspicious of the mass pro- duced unconscious and of everyone's favourite fantasy, warned by twen- tieth century's experience that generalising fantasies only leads more quickly to more massive ones". ModeAnism, Poitmode/inibm. Bucknell U.P., Lewisberg, p. 141 In Garvin, H.R. 1980: Romantic-iim, Ibid, p, 339 9. Adorno, T.W. 1970: AeAtheti&che. Theonle., Frankfurt, 10. 11. Kafka, F. 1971: Vanablei and Panadoxei. Schocken, New York, p. 93 12. Butler, C. 1980: A^teA the Wake.: An Enay on the. ContemponaAy Avant- p. 15 Gande. Clarendon, Oxford, p. 111 13. Jameson, F. 1977: "Reflections in Conclusion" in Aej,thetixn> and Voti- tuu,. New Left Books, London, p. 208 14. Ashberry, J. 1976: The Double. Vieam o£ Spiting. Ecco Press, New York, p. 53 15. Jameson's account, in "Language and Modes of Production" (unpublished manuscript), pp. 28-29 16. LukScs, G. 1983: Hiitoiy and Clan Con&cUou&neii. MIT Press, Cam- bridge, Mass, p. 103 17. Jameson, F. 1976: "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture", Social Text, No 1, p. 133 18. Examples of these intermediate cultural forms are: the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, EL Doctorow, and Kathy Acker; the music of Phillip Glass; the multimedia performances of Laurie Anderson 19. Adorno, T.W. 1975: "Culture Industry Reconsidered", Hew German CnJLt- •ique, No 6, p. 17. As Andreas Huyssen reminds us, Adorno's hostility towards the culture industry should not be misread as snobbery towards the popular: "Critics such as TS Eliot and philosophers such as Ortega y Gasset saw the masses as threatening to all culture £tom betow. Ad- orno's insistence on autonomy, however, is the logical result of his analysis of mass culture as the intentional integration of its consu- mers Inom above, Adorno refers explicitly to changes in production and distribution". In "Introduction to Adorno", New Genman CtUtLque., No 6, 1975, p. 8 Ant& Vol 3 Ho 2 19S4 33 20. Ithiel de Sola Pool, 1963: de la modernisation et du changement technoiogique" in Hoselitz, B. and Moore, W. (eds.): eX. SocleZi. UNESCO, Paris, p. 287 "Le Role de la conmunication le processus rndtatUalUaUon 21. Quoted in Neu> Vonk Time* Magazine, 6 February, 1983, p. 27 ACAMADIAN MAGAZINE 5th Floor 489 College Street Toronto, Ontario M6G 1A5 • 4? 1yf. J 1 2 / 2 y i. J2O. Insolutais: 1 yf. $18 / 2 yr. $27 Outside Canada: add $3 00. payabto in US tuods THE CULTURAL NEWSMAGAZINE AIVU Vol 3 No I 19S4 34