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Postmodernism Inside Out

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Anderson (special Indian Price, 5.50) tells us.

Lyotard took Yeats famous the centre cannot hold a step further: he said there were lots of centres and none of them hold. Instead, he added, we are exposed to a babble of diverse and contradictory fragments of stories, and the arts and the sciences go their diverse ways. Like most French philosophers that are often less than lucid, Lyotards argument is, in some ways, a subtle and difficult one but not hard to sense what the multistoried world looks like. All you need to do is open your TV and go channel watching, listen to religious prophecies, political messages, forecasts of ecological and economic doom which is just a commercial break away from the promise of a better tomorrow. Every channel seems to be addressed to a subculture of another ethnic group, another age level, another profession or interest or lifestyle. A similar array of messages is being sent to every part of the world people everywhere being bombarded by sermons, commercials, vivid images of people having different kinds of lives.

 

Postmodernism, then, is indifferent to consistency and continuity altogether. It splices genres, attitudes, styles. It blurs or juxtaposes forms (fiction-non-fiction), stances (straight-ironic), moods (violent-comic), cultural levels (high-low). It scoffs at originality and fancies copies, repetition, the re-working of hand-me-down scraps. As Anderson says in his longish introduction, It neither embraces nor criticises, but looks at the world blankly, with a knowingness that is indistinguishable from irony. It pulls the rug from under itself, displaying an acute self-consciousness about the works constructed nature. It takes pleasure in the play of surfaces and derides the search for depth as mere nostalgia. Surface is illusion, so is depth. Above all, it regards individual as a sentimental attachment, a fiction to be enclosed within quotation marks.

But what is going on here and everywhere that produces such a burst of cultural chaos and creativity, such rampant pluralism, the herd of independent minds? What gives so many people the pessimism to tinker with the hallowed traditions of society mixing rituals and traditions, inventing new personal identities, revising old political ideologies, picking and choosing what to believe and what not to believe? Is there a pattern that links such diverse events as the collapse of communism, the information-communications revolution, the doctrinal civil ways within organised religions and the restless cultural and spiritual wanderings of the educated and the affluent?

Probably because postmodernism is a huge melting pot, the Fontana Reader has divided the study into four parts, each with its sub-sections. All have extracts from the writings of leading lights of postmodernism. If you want a guided tour into the diverse and often contradictory postures of postmodernism the Reader gives it all.

A phenomenon this sweeping cannot be attributed to a single cause. The Reader posits several theories. They are not incompatible but their emphasis is different. Each contributes to an explanation; none is sufficient. Briefly, some of these are:

Marxists have argued that postmodernism is an ideology suited to further the global economic system that capitalism has become. High-consumption capitalism requires a ceaseless transformation of style, a conoisseurship of surface, an emphasis on packaging and reproducibility; postmodern art echoes the truth that the arts have become auxiliary to sales. In order to adapt, consumers are weaned away from traditions, their selves become decentred and a well-formed interior life an anachronism. Postmodernism expresses the spiritless spirit of a global class linked via borderless mass media with mass culture, omnivorous consumption and easy travel...Space is not real, only time.

Scientific reason is the corrosive force that has eroded the authority of narrative style and especially of the grand metanarratives like the Enlightenment, capitalism, Marxism etc that put reason at the centre of the discourse. Quantum theory and microphysics have undermined certainty and continuity.

Because of the tremendous expansion of the visual media, postmodern fiction has become video fiction or televisonese. It creates the experience of watching television. All postmodern writing is in the present tense because that is televisions only tense; everything is happening right now, in the middle; there are no beginnings and no ends. Growing up on fragmented television, to which they give their fragmented attention, these writers produce short scenes juxtaposed almost at random, Characters live inconclusively, forever poised for action rather than engaged in it.

Because postmodernism was born in the US, it represents the essence of a polyethnic culture, a marketplace jamboree. The essence of American culture is the variety show, finding a place for everyone postmodernisms prototype.

There is a lot more in the Reader and any one not quite familiar with post-modernism would find it an excellent guide through the thickets of the ongoing debate.

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First Published: Apr 05 1997 | 12:00 AM IST

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