Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century

391 Pages·2015·2.14 MB·English

by  David Rudrum

For Alice
and
for Suzy

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Exploring this Anthology
Part 1 The Sense of an Ending
1 Epilogue: The Postmodern … in Retrospect (2002) and Gone Forever, But Here
To Stay: The Legacy of the Postmodern (2007) Linda Hutcheon
2 Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust (2003) Ihab Hassan
3 Postmodernism Grown Old (2005) Steven Connor
4 The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond (2006) Alan Kirby
5 They Might Have Been Giants (2007) John McGowan
6 Post-Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time Capitalism
(2012) Jeffrey T. Nealon
Part 2 Coming to Terms with the New
7 Remodernism
The Stuckist Manifesto (1999) Billy Childish and Charles Thomson
Remodernism (2000) Billy Childish and Charles Thomson
8 Performatism
‘Introduction’ from Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (2008) Raoul
Eshelman
Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (American Beauty) (2000, revised
2008) Raoul Eshelman
9 Hypermodernism
Time Against Time, or The Hypermodern Society (2004, trans. 2005) Gilles
Lipovetsky
10 Automodernism
Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism: Autonomy and Automation in Culture,
Technology, and Education (2007) Robert Samuels
11 Renewalism
Introduction: A Wake and Renewed? (2007) Josh Toth and Neil Brooks
from The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary
(2010) Josh Toth
12 Altermodernism
Altermodern Manifesto: Postmodernism is Dead (2009) Nicolas Bourriaud
Altermodern (2009) Nicolas Bourriaud
13 Digimodernism
from Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and
Reconfigure our Culture (2009) Alan Kirby
14 Metamodernism
Notes on Metamodernism (2010) Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker
Conclusions
15 Note on the Supplanting of ‘Post-’ David Rudrum
16 The Anxieties of the Present Nicholas Stavris
Index
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, our thanks go to Haaris Naqvi and Mary Al-Sayed at Bloomsbury
for taking on this project and helping us see it through to completion. We would also
like to thank Robert Eaglestone for his initial encouragement and enthusiasm for the
idea of such a book, which persuaded us that this was a project worth undertaking.
Much of the funding that made it possible to pay for permission to reprint many of
the writings anthologised herein came from the generous research budget of the School
of Music, Humanities and Media at the University of Huddersfield. We are particularly
grateful for this financial support, as without it we would have had to settle for a much
less ambitious anthology.
We acknowledge with due thanks the respective publishers for permission to reprint
the following writings:
‘Epilogue: The Postmodern … in Retrospect’ from Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of
Postmodernism, 2nd edition, Copyright © 2002, Routledge. Reproduced by permission
of Taylor & Francis Books UK.
‘Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust’ by Ihab Hassan, from
Beyond Postmodernism: Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture, ed. Klaus
Stierstorfer, Copyright © 2003, Walter de Gruyter. Reproduced with permission.
‘Auto-Modernity after Postmodernism: Autonomy and Automation in Culture,
Technology, and Education’ by Robert Samuels, from McPherson, Tara, ed., Digital
Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected, pp. 219–40, © 2008 Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, by permission of The MIT Press.
Material from Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-In-Time
Capitalism by Jeffrey T. Nealon, Copyright © 2012, the Board of Trustees of the Leland
Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford
University Press: http://www.sup.org
Material from Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism by Raoul Eshelman,
Copyright © 2008, Davies Group. Reproduced with permission, all rights reserved.
Material from Hypermodern Times, by Gilles Lipovetsky, trans. Andrew Brown,
Copyright © 2005, Polity. Reproduced with permission. This book was first published
by Grasset in 2004 under the title Les Temps Hypermodernes, and we are particularly
grateful to Ellen MacDonald-Kramer of Polity for securing the permission of the
original publisher.
Material from The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the
Contemporary, by Josh Toth, reprinted by permission from the State University of New
York Press, © 2010, State University of New York. All rights reserved.
Material from Postmodernism: What Moment? ed. Pelagia Goulimari, Copyright ©
2007 Manchester University Press. Reproduced with permission.
Material from Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern
and Reconfigure our Culture © Alan Kirby, 2009, and Continuum US, an imprint of
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. Reproduced with permission.
Altermodern Manifesto and material from Altermodern, by Nicolas Bourriaud, © Tate
2009, reproduced by permission of Tate Trustees.
‘Notes on Metamodernism’ by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, from
Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 2, 2010, is reproduced here thanks to the
commendable open access policy of that journal. We regret that it was not possible to
include the many images that accompanied the original article, nor the abstract with
which it began. For the terms of creative commons license governing further use of this
text, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
‘Introduction: A Wake and Renewed?’ by Neil Brooks and Josh Toth, republished
with permission of Rodopi, from The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of
Postmodernism, eds. Neil Brooks and Josh Toth, 2007; permission conveyed through
Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
We are personally grateful to Vlad Strukov for his kind permission to reprint Steven
Connor’s ‘Postmodernism Grown Old’. This chapter was originally published in Maria
Popova and Vlad Strukov (eds.) Cul’tura ‘Post’: on the Crossroads of Culture and
Civilization, Voronezh, Voronezh UP, 2004, pp. 55–73.
We are similarly indebted to Alan Kirby for his permission to reprint his article ‘The
Death of Postmodernism and Beyond’, from Philosophy Now, Issue 58,
November/December 2006.
We thank Charles Thomson and Billy Childish for permission to reprint ‘The Stuckist
Manifesto’ and ‘Remodernism’. Both are available at http://www.stuckism.com, and in
in The Stuckists: The First Remodernist Art Group, ed. Katherine Evans (London:
Victoria Press, 2000).
Introduction
David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris
As dead horses go, the notion of postmodernity is certainly one of the most heavily
flogged in recent cultural memory. Philosophers and sociologists, critics and theorists,
artists and writers alike have spent the better part of half a century formulating
definitions of it; arguments for and against it; analyses and interpretations of it;
historical, economic, sociological, and political contextualizations of it; textbooks about
it and introductions to it; and even the occasional spirited refutation of its very
existence. All in all, the ink expended on discussing postmodernity – alternatively
‘postmodernism’ or ‘the postmodern’, according to each commentator’s preference –
has flowed from so many diverse and far-flung tributaries that tracing the headwaters of
the raging torrent’s source became all but impossible quite some time ago.
But this river is no longer in spate; the flood has subsided. Not only is there markedly
less ink given over to the discussion of the postmodern in the early twenty-first century
than there was in the late twentieth, but such discussions of it as are written today seem
impelled with increasing regularity to the conclusion that postmodernism is rapidly
becoming a thing of the past. Works of contemporary art and literature seem ever less
amenable to analysis by criticism emphasizing postmodernist modes and traits.
Philosophers and theorists are no longer as inspired by the question of modernity’s
aftermath – some of them (Zygmunt Bauman or Jacques Rancière, for instance) are
conspicuously retreating from the notion of postmodernity. Perhaps the artists and
writers who do not baulk at being tarred with the postmodernist brush were always few,
but their number is apparently decreasing. The postmodern river, it would seem, is
drying up.
How to account for this downturn in what was the most hotly contested cultural
debate of the latter part of the twentieth century? If we may stretch this fluvial metaphor
tauter still, its aptness resides in what happens to mighty rivers as they near the end of
their journey: they slow down, as their swift currents lose their force under the weight
of the sediment they have swept along with them; and they lose their way, bifurcating
and fragmenting into the confusingly forked paths of a delta. With apologies to T.S.
Eliot, they end not with a splash but a trickle. This is more or less exactly what has
happened to the question of postmodernity in the early twenty-first century. In its early
stages, postmodernism surged swiftly and noisily over rapids and maelstroms: it loudly
courted controversy in its exuberant formulations and proclamations, and the debates it
sparked were always heated, often acrimonious. Think, for example, of Barthes on the
death of the author, Foucault on the disappearance of man, Derrida on the non-existence
of the hors-texte, Baudrillard on the loss of the real, or Lyotard on the demise of grand
narratives: all these sets of rapids and maelstroms were negotiated within just fifteen
years of each other, and some took a good couple of generations before the whitewater
abated. As John McGowan puts it in his essay in Part One of this volume, the stakes in
these debates were so high that sometimes it seemed as if ‘nothing less than the West’s
soul hung in the balance’. However, the cultural commentator looking at the same river
today would not recognize those heady days in its current stagnated, sluggish state. The
reasons behind this seem to us to resemble the factors that cause the slowing down of
any other mature river.
On the one hand, ‘the postmodern’ has become so broad a concept that its breadth,
like that of a river, slows it down by dispersing it. This breadth has become so all-
encompassing that, as a term, it can now be applied to more or less anything, and so
describes essentially nothing. Moreover, like a river accumulating silt, the idea of the
postmodern has picked up so much cultural baggage that its critical focus has been
irretrievably swamped. For examples of this, reading Steven Connor’s essay in the first
part of this anthology will lead one to reflect that whereas the term ‘postmodernism’,
when applied to architecture, meant turning one’s back on modernist minimalism and
re-embracing, albeit ironically, a return to certain kinds of ornamentation, the same term
when applied to dance is generally taken to mean turning one’s back on modernist
ornamentation in order to embrace a (confusingly) postmodernist minimalism: the same
term, then, is used to describe two currents flowing in apparently opposite directions.
A similar ambivalence that verges on contradiction can be found in the irony that,
while certain strains of the postmodern can trace their source to the anarchism that flung
up barricades in May 1968, the idea of the postmodern now informs contemporary
debates in legal theory and jurisprudence. The terms ‘postmodern’ and ‘postmodernist’
have simply become too broad – too inclusive, too all-embracing – to function
effectively as critical or descriptive terms. As Klaus Stierstorfer puts it, ‘Postmodernism
as a whole may have become too blunt a tool to be useful in debating many of the most
hotly contested issues today’ (Stierstorfer 2003: 9). In other words, if postmodernism
was once a mighty flowing river, it now seems to lack a clear current or a direction and
so, leading apparently nowhere, it scarcely resembles a river at all. It is a spent force,
and many critics and theorists – including some of its erstwhile champions – appear to
be giving up on it altogether. Some are even publicly renouncing it. In the telling words
of Linda Hutcheon, who did more than most for the currency of postmodernism, and
whose writings open this collection, ‘it’s over’.
On the other hand, and at the same time, the slowing down and stagnation of
postmodernism have been intimately related to a number of new developments. Dating
from the fin de millénaire years to the present, a number of offshoots of the postmodern
have been striking out in a multitude of new directions from it, and some of these
directions seem to run athwart the main postmodern currents. Coinages with such
striking names as ‘altermodernism’ and ‘automodernism’, ‘metamodernism’ and
‘hypermodernism’, ‘remodernism’ and ‘digimodernism’, ‘performatism’ and
‘renewalism’ have been mooted by cultural theorists and critics, and sometimes by
artists themselves, in order to diagnose or champion ways in which the art, literature,
and culture of the twenty-first century involve important differences and new departures
from the mainstream of postmodernism. (Incidentally, that it is possible, and perhaps
even unavoidable, to talk of ‘the mainstream of postmodernism’ is telling in itself. Time
was this phrase would have been self-contradictory.) While some of these coinages are
at pains to distance themselves as much as possible from the postmodernism that
preceded them, others are more willing to accept that their formulations follow on from
those of a now-defunct postmodernism, taking them in new directions. These new
directions, however, are many and varied, and sometimes at odds with one another. If
we may be permitted one last stretching of the river metaphor, we might think of them
as collectively constituting a ‘delta effect’. That is, as the flow that was once
postmodernism slows to a halt, it diverges and splits into multiple channels, with
different streams striking out along different courses, forming the delta of the once-
mighty postmodern river.
The shape of this anthology is in large measure based on these two tendencies. Its
first part contains writings that, in various ways and from various angles, explore the
idea that postmodernism is in decline, or simply is no more. We have borrowed the apt
phrase ‘The Sense of an Ending’ as a title to this part, since it describes so effectively a
widespread intuition that the postmodern moment is now over, give or take the singing
of a few proverbial fat ladies. The title is borrowed from a recent prize-winning novel
by Julian Barnes, itself borrowing it in turn from Frank Kermode’s classic 1967 study,
which explores the importance of the trope of apocalypse to narrative fiction. The
double origin of this title could, perhaps, be taken to illustrate some of the
complications involved in arguing that postmodernism is over and done with: on the
one hand, the fact that one of Britain’s foremost writers of postmodern fiction was
awarded the Man Booker prize for The Sense of an Ending in 2011 might suggest that
postmodernism is not altogether out of favour just yet; on the other hand, that he chose
a title redolent of apocalyptic anxieties might suggest that one of the foremost
postmodern novelists shares the suspicion that the end of an era has finally come. In
effect, this ambiguity sums up the findings of many of the writings in this part of the
book: postmodernity is not an easy thing to draw a line under, because its legacy still
has a persistent influence, and so identifying the watershed moment at which it ended is
all but impossible. Hence, Linda Hutcheon’s retrospective phrase ‘gone forever but here
to stay’ is probably a more judicious verdict than the bald assertion that the postmodern
is over and done with.
Asserting that the postmodern is over and done with, however, instantly gives rise to
the inevitable question: what’s next? If we no longer live in the postmodern era, what
kind of an era are we now living in? The second part of this anthology consists of a
range of writings that seek to formulate answers to this question. Most of them attempt
to diagnose or describe tendencies in our culture that are distinct from postmodernism:
they are thus mostly interventions in criticism. Some, however, call for an art that will
bring into being a successor to postmodernism: thus, there are two manifestos included
herein. What is shared in these different kinds of writing is the need to coin a term to