Page 188 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

176 POSTMODERNISM AND THE ‘OTHER SIDE’

STAKING OUT THE POSTS
To say ‘post’ is to say ‘past’—hence questions of periodization are
inevitably raised. There is however little agreement as to what it is we are
alleged to have surpassed, when that passage is supposed to have occurred
and what effects it is supposed to have had (see, for example, Perry
Anderson’s (1984) closely argued objections to Marshall Berman’s (1982)
(extremely loose and imprecise) periodization of modernization/ modernism
in All That Is Solid Melts into Air). Michael Newman (1986) further
problematizes the apparently superseded term in postmodernism by
pointing out that there are at least two artistic modernisms articulating
different politico-aesthetic aspirations which remain broadly incompatible
and non-synchronous. The first, which is ultimately derived from Kant,
seeks to establish the absolute autonomy of art and finds its most extreme
and dictatorial apologist in Clement Greenberg, the American critic who
sought to ‘purify’ art of all ‘non-essentials’ by championing the cause of
abstract expressionism—the style of painting most strictly confined to an
exploration of the materials and two-dimensionality of paint on canvas.
The second modernist tradition which Newman (1986) traces back to
Hegel aspires to the heteronomous dissolution of art into life/political
practice and leads through the surrealists, the constructivists, the futurists,
etc., to performance artists and the conceptualists of the 1970s.
If the unity, the boundaries and the timing of modernism itself remain
contentious issues, then postmodernism seems to defy any kind of critical
consensus. Not only do different writers define it differently, but a single
writer can talk at different times about different ‘posts’. Thus Jean-
François Lyotard (1986a) has recently used the term postmodernism to
refer to three separate tendencies: (1) a trend within architecture away from
the Modern Movement’s project ‘of a last rebuilding of the whole space
occupied by humanity’, (2) a decay in confidence in the idea of progress
and modernization (‘there is a sort of sorrow in the Zeitgeist’) and (3) a
recognition that it is no longer appropriate to employ the metaphor of the
‘avant garde’ as if modern artists were soldiers fighting on the borders of
knowledge and the visible, prefiguring in their art some kind of collective
global future. J.G.Merquior (1986) (in a hostile critique of what he calls
the ‘postmodern ideology’) offers a different triptych: (1) a style or mood
of exhaustion of/dissatisfaction with modernism in art and literature, (2) a
trend in post-structuralist philosophy and (3) a new cultural age in the
West.
Furthermore the Post is differently inflected in different national
contexts. It was, for instance, notable that The Anti-Aesthetic in the edition
available in the United States arrived on the shelves beneath a suitably
austere, baleful and more or less abstract (modernist?) lilac-and-black
cover which echoed the Nietzschian tone of the title. However, when the