Divergences: modernism, postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard

PETER NICHOLLS

Divergences: modernism, postmodernism, Jameson

and Lyotard

Is the postmodernism debate finally grinding to a halt? My question is prompted specifically by the appearance of Fredric Jameson’s new volume Postmodemism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.* The terms Jameson uses here to distinguish modernism from postmodernism are certainly familiar ones. While postmodernism is identified with ‘capitalism itself’ (p. 343), modernism is seen as responding to the incomplete process of modernisation (p. 310), a set of conditions which allowed it to maintain a measure of critical distance from a developing consumer culture. With the loss of that distance goes hermeneutic ’depth’ and a certain affect; a postmodern culture sustained by the globalising tendencies of late capitalism is, Jameson argues once more, a predominantly ‘spatial’ one and no longer has room for the thematics of time and memory which were so important to modernism.

The ‘retreat’ of language

These ideas are familiar from the 1984 essay with which Jameson opens this collection,* and in the remainder of the volume he uses them to stage a fuller characterisation of some of the dominant modes of the postmodern. His attention here to new technologies of reproduction (notably video, but film and television are also considered) gives the whole account of postmodernism a stronger developmental thrust than it had before. Now the argument for a fundamental structural continuity between modern and postmodern capitalism (the link is made, as before, via the work of Ernest Mandel) is complicated by a powerful sense of the deliquescence of hitherto privileged artistic forms. With the exception of a long essay on Claude Simon’s Les Corps conducteurs (a novel published back in 1971), the new book gives very little space to literary questions, mainly because the postmodern is now seen as the price paid by ‘language and the linguistic arts, which retreat before the democracy of the visual and the aural’ (p. 318). As video becomes ’the most likely candidate of cultural hegemony today’

2 Critical Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3

(p. 69), so, says Jameson, ’the written text loses its privileged exemplary status’ (p. 68).

As the rather McLuhanite ring of that last sentence suggests, Jameson’s account of postmodern culture cannot quite detach itself from what he calls ‘the modernist developmental or historical paradigm’ (p. 324), with the result that the only other contemporary writer to elicit enthusiasm is William Gibson, whose ‘cyberpunk’ fiction Jameson celebrates as ’an exceptional literary realization within a predominantly visual and aural postmodern production‘ (p. 38).3 While such unelaborated statements have become characteristic of Jameson’s prose, this one can also be explained in terms of his preoccupation with spatiality as the feature which most effectively differentiates the postmodern from the modern. Gibson’s ideas of ’cyberspace’ and virtual reality in fact provide an analogue to Jameson’s own version of Baudrillardian concepts of ’hyperspace’ and ’simulation’.

When it comes to Anglo-American fiction considered more generally, though, Jameson concludes that, in the postmodem period, ‘the architec- ture is generally a great improvement; the novels are much worse’ (p. 299). In his lengthy conclusion, some grounds are offered for this summary view. Here he distinguishes between two main tendencies, leaving the reader for the most part to supply the names of relevant writers: first we have ’postmodern fantastic historiography’, ‘Pynchonesque fantasies’ where ‘a semblance of historical verisimilitude is vibrated into multiple alternate pattern^'.^ This ‘making up of unreal history is a substitute for the making of the real kind‘, and Jameson concludes that ’The new free play with the past . . . is obviously equally allergic to the priorities and commit- ments, let alone the responsibilities, of the various tediously committed kinds of partisan history’ (p. 369).

If this seems a slightly odd reading of Pynchon, whose exploration of some of Jameson’s favourite concepts, such as ’globalism’, might have earned him a better place in the ranking, all becomes clearer when we reach the second category, that of ‘spatial historiography’. The privileged exhibit 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 production of imaginary people and events among whom from time to time real-life ones unexpectedly appear and disappear’ (p. 369). That description might apply as well to Gravity‘s Rainbow, but the force of Jameson’s distinction lies in the apparent proximity of this type of writing to a spatial disposition of events comparable to ’switching channels on a cable television set’ (p. 373). Ragtime gets a better rating because it is apparently all about

Divergences: modernism, postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard 3

bringing its mix of characters into the same fictional space, and it therefore seems to Jameson distinctively postmodern in its downplaying of temporality and the processes of (narrative) memory.

This provocatively brief sketch of postmodern fiction derives some of its magisterial assurance from Jameson’s rigid line of demarcation between modernism and postmodernism. Nowhere is this clearer than in his insistence on the disappearance of memory in the postmodern. In the chapter on video, for example, we learn that ’memory seems to play no role in television, 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 exclusion of memory’, arguing that ’In the postmodern . . . the past itself has disappeared (along with the well-known ’‘sense of the past” or historicity and collective memory)’ (p. 309).

Perhaps it’s just the phrasing here which is problematic - the apocalyptic ‘has disappeared’, which recalls Baudrillard’s habitual announcement of the ‘end’ of just about everything - or else it’s a matter of what is desig- nated as postmodern and what is not. Either way, it’s difficult not to conclude that, for Jameson, postmodern fiction really amounts to not much more than ‘the tedious autoreferential fabulations of the short-lived Anglo- American “new novel”’ (p. 367). How otherwise to account for what we might regard as the main strand of recent American fiction - work by Toni Morrison, Robert Coover, Ishmael Reed, Jayne Anne Phillips, Bobbie Ann Mason, Don DeLillo (the list could be much longer) - which is distinguished above all by precisely its preoccupation with questions of narrative and memory (the poetics of ’rememory’, to use Morrison’s word)?

With that in mind, we might also want to turn back to modernism to see how Jameson‘s categories work there. Once again, the model seems restricted in application on at least two grounds: while we know that the modernists were much preoccupied with questions of memory and dur- ation, many of them (particularly those of the prewar continental avant- garde) were also concerned with analogies between writing and painting and with concepts of simultaneity and visual space. Equally awkward for the general outlines of Jameson’s historiography is the very ‘postmodern’ enthusiasm with which some of these avant-garde writers and artists - not only the Italian Futurists, but French writers like Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars - celebrated the global implications of an expanding consumer economy (Jameson follows Perry Anderson in claiming that all forms of modernism, regardless of their views of technology, were ultimately ‘hostile to the market itself’, pp. 304-305).5


Opposition or continuity?

The difficulties with these arguments derive in large measure from Jameson‘s developmental view, which is founded on a rigorous, unpass- able opposition between modern and postmodern (’the way back to the modern is sealed for good’, p. 156). What then happens if we allow the two forms to play into each other (after all, one recurring complaint about the notion of postmodernism is that almost all its principal features already exist in one form of modernism or another6)? It’s here that Lyotard’s conception of the postmodern might offer a valuable alternative or supplement to Jameson’s, allowing us to think continuities between early and late parts of the century and at the same time to recognise divergences within the otherwise abstractly epochal ‘moments’ of modernism and postmodernism. From a literary point of view, Lyotard’s proposals have the additional advantage that they do not suppose any ’retreat’ of language in the postmodern but rather conceive of the postmodern as a disruption of the discursive systems on which modernity depends. Lyotard’s way of signalling this disruption as the opening of an alterity or ’other’ within language provides, then, a sense of the postmodern - a mode not an epoch7 - as something beyond ‘simulation’, thereby releasing us, perhaps, from the closed circuits of a Baudrillardian ‘America’ in which the social has been thoroughly transmuted into the semiotic.

Lyotard’s rather stylish reversal of the postmodern problematic is well known: ‘A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Post- modernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.’s In shifting ground from Jameson to Lyotard we should note a change in terminology. For Lyotard, ‘modernism’ tends to be synonymous with the ’modern’, and can be defined as ’the discourse of a subject who achieves autonomy by understanding itself as the narrator of hi~tory’ .~ The postmodern is that moment which registers the instability of such a discourse (and such a subject) - an instability which modernism ’forgets’ in order to constitute itself, So we arrive at the famous formulation:

The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.l0

The postmodern therefore occurs as a singular event in a moment before the rules of its repetition can be articulated; as such it is marked by a certain


’formlessness’ because, as Lyotard continues, ‘The artist and writer are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.’ In contrast, ’good forms’, which open the text to the adjudications of consensual ’taste’, permit, as Lyotard explains in an earlier book, ’the return of the same’, and he aligns them there with the formal elements which allow recognition and a sense of compositional unity (the resolution of dissonance in music, plastic ‘rhymes’ in painting, and so on).11

For some reason, Jameson seems consistently to misinterpret Lyotard’s proposal, which he sees as simply invoking ’a return to the older critical high modernisrn‘.l2 In fact since Lyotard has no sense of an epochal modernism or postmodernism, he would attribute any desire for ‘return’ or repetition to the legitimating drive of modern narratives. As he puts it, ‘the “post-” of postmodern does not signlfy a movement . . . of repetition but a process of the order of ana-, of analysis, of anamnesis, of anagogy, of anamorphosis, which works through an ”initial f0rgetting”.’~3 The prefix am- takes us to the Greek which the OED defines as ’up, in place or time, back, again, anew‘, and for Lyotard it signais not a dialectical move toward synthesis but rather an internal displacement - spatial and temporal - against a system of meanings. Such displacement Lyotard then associates with Freud’s concept of ’working through’ (Durcharbeitung), which Laplanche and Pontalis describe as ’a sort of psychical work which allows the subject to accept certain repressed elements and to free himself from the grip of mechanisms of repetition.’I4 In Lyotard’s view, the artists of the avant-garde (a category which can equally embrace Manet and Barnett Newman) constantly ’work through’ the meaning of the modern, disrupt- ing its closed forms of temporal and linguistic order. Lyotard therefore jettisons the avant-garde myth of ’rupture’, observing that this amounts to a forgetting or repression of the past which necessitates its unconscious repetition; instead, he envisages something of the order of Freud’s anamnesis by which an analysand ’tries to work through his present trouble by freely associating incompatible elements with past situations’.l5

Figures

I will return to the idea of temporality contained in these remarks. We should note first, though, that Lyotard is proposing a fundamental distinction between the modern discourse of knowledge and the domain of the aesthetic. Where, in his view, ‘knowledge presupposes precisely the neat separation of its own discourse from its object of knowledge’,16 the art of the avant-garde is marked by internal displacements which reveal the limits of discursive systems by disclosing the interdependence of meaning


and its ’other’, those objects and events which lie beyond the edge of the closed systems of language and the perspectival grid. In a critique of Saussure’s theoretically closed linguistic system, predicated on a network of equivalences and oppositions, Lyotard observes that ’all discourse is projected in the direction of something which it tries to seize, and that it is incomplete and open, rather as the visual field is partial, limited and extended by a h0rizon.’~7 The ‘openness’ of discourse is procured by the existence of what Lyotard calls the ’figural’ as an element within it. By this term he means what Bill Readings succinctly defines as ‘the resistant or irreconcilable trace of a space or time that is radically incommensurable with that of discursive meaning’. Perhaps the clearest example of such elements within language are shifters, or deictics, words like ’I’ and ’here’, whose meanings are produced in the ‘event’ of language-use rather than from the internal oppositions of discourse. But the figural appears in various guises across Lyotard’s work and can also be constituted by the visual and spatial nature of a text, by a desire which operates within the play of meanings, by the nondiscursive engagement of the body’s experience, and, in his later writings especially, by the incommensurability of time frames by which an order of narration is disrupted by the present in which the narration takes place. Lyotard’s various essays on painting and cinema constantly seek to disclose this ‘materiality that cannot be reduced to a meaning or truth’.l9

I have outlined Lyotard’s theory in some detail for two reasons: first, because his account of ’discourse’ and ’figure’ offers a way of talking about divergent strands in what we conventionally call modernism; and second, because his conception of a postmodern temporality might help to locate that body of recent writing about which Jameson has said so little. There is the possibility, too, that Lyotard’s anti-linguisticism might free us from the now tedious clichC of the postmodern as the pure condition of self- referring signs.

It is necessary to emphasise here that discourse and figure are not opposites: Lyotard warns that ’language and its other are inseparable’,z0 that the figural inhabits the discursive, so it would be pointless to argue that modernism is discursive and postmodernism figural,21 or, indeed, that some forms of modernism are simply discursive and others simply figural. What I want to suggest is that some forms of modernism exploit internal resistances to signification while others found their project on an assumption of the capacity of literary language to subordinate the sensible to the discursive. (It is this second form of modernism which has become the foil of the postmodern in many recent discussions.) Perhaps it will come as no surprise to find that this divergence between the various forms of modern-


ism over the question of (un)presentability articulates itself around the concept of sexual difference, with the figural strongly marked by the historical ambiguities of the ‘feminine’.

irony and discourse

There is an early poem by Baudelaire (probably composed between 1845 and 1846) called ’To a Red-haired Beggar Girl’ which may be read as a sort of inaugural moment of that second strand of modernism - a strand often marked by a taint of cruelty and unpleasantness exercised at the expense of the feminine, Baudelaire’s choice of theme isn’t especially original since the poem’s way of adjudicating the claims of natural and artificial beauty connects it with a minor sub-genre of writing about attractive beggar girls.22 What is particularly interesting, though, is the ambiguity of tone. For some critics, the level of identification between the girl and the poet - they share in a ’reduced’ state which is characteristic of the fate of beauty in the modern world - testifies to a ’humanitarian’ impulse beneath the deliberately playful surface of the poem.” The poet cannot afford to give the girl the finery she craves, and his own poverty parallels the loss of a ’courtly’ culture associated with Ronsard and Belleau. The last lines of the poem then seem to reassure us that finery and artifice are superfluous in view of the girl’s natural (semi-naked) beauty. But of course the whole voyeuristic fantasy which is projected here says precisely the opposite, for without it the girl would be powerless and inarticulate. The focus is, in fact, on the expert gaze of the poet, which gives only to take away, abolish- ing one social distance between himself and the girl only to replace it with another which is primarily aesthetic.

If the title of the poem leads us to anticipate an expression of the poet’s desire, Baudelaire actually goes to some lengths to attribute that desire to others, stressing that the girl is admired and coveted by many men, of whom the poet is only one. Or perhaps even that is to say too much, for the fantasy of the girl as a wealthy courtesan is one in which he himself does not figure as a lover. This may explain our sense of manipulation here, for the poet’s way of clothing and unclothing the girl - testimony, perhaps, to the power of Lyotard’s ’good forms’ - is clearly done for the enjoyment of others. The tone of the poem is actually not so much humanitarian as pimpish, and its detachment recalls the cool deliberations of the ‘great‘ seducers for whom the physical pleasures of sex are as nothing compared to the discourse of sexuality, to that tantalising narrative to which sex would provide a somewhat unwelcome termination.

The weaving of this discourse is coterminous with an ironic distancing


which here as elsewhere Baudelaire sees as fundamental to the ’cold’ detachment of the p~et-as-dandy.~~ And this irony is also the mark of an overcoming of a certain materiality - the feminine ’naturalness’ of the girl which prevents her from conceiving of herse2f as something qther than she is (the vital prerequisite of romantic irony). The girl may be sexy, but she is self-presence incarnate; and while her body certainly exerts an ‘appeal’ for Baudelaire’s poet, that is primarily because it prompts him to create that ironic distance which is alone capable of producing his literary style. In submitting his desire to the discipline of irony, the poet thus achieves a kind of disembodiment (he is absent from his words and the text says the opposite of what it seems to say).

The voyeurism of the poem is, then, a product of that superiority of view which irony gives (in his essay on laughter, Baudelaire speaks of ways ’to instil in the spectator, or rather in the reader, the feeling of joy at his own superiority and the joy of man’s superiority over nature’z). The interesting question, though, is what constitutes the ground of that superiority. In part, of course, it is the privileged duplicity of the romantic ironist, his capacity to cast himself as observer and observed, and to make that division the ground of a judgmental authority located somewhere outside the poem. But we can add to this that the poem is also exemplary in its way of establishing the ironic posture, with its objectivity and cool manipulation, as not part of a masterful style simply chosen by the poet, but one which is forced upon him by the ’challenge’ of the femininelnatural.26

Jean Baudrillard has detected precisely this logic in Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer (1843), where, he says, ‘The seducer by himself is nothing; the seduction originates entirely with the girl. This is why Johannes can claim to have learned everything from Cordelia. He is not being hypocritical. The calculated seduction mirrors the natural seduction, drawing from the latter as its source, but all the better to eliminate it.’ 27 This is rather more complicated than the commonplace claim that ‘she made me do it’, for the cruelty of seduction collapses ethical values into aesthetic ones, making the ‘elimination’ of the feminine the very mark of that triumph of form over ‘bodily’ content on which one major strand of modernism rests. All of which may remind us that, in Lyotard’s terms this type of irony takes place ’after the event’ (it is, as Barthes says, a classic language for this reason, since there is always one master code which closes the play of competing onesa). The work of ‘elimination’, the exercise of irony against the feminine, produces a reversal of Lyotard’s future anterior (tense of the postmodern), insisting that the natural can be known only from the vantage-point of the non- natural, that the sensible has to be ’won’ from the side of discourse.


Bodily writing

When we look at nineteenth-century writing after Baudelaire, though, it is clear that this ironic position is not the only one to emerge. In the work of Mallarmb in particular, the rhetoric of irony, with its dependence on forms of authorial mastery and duplicity, is displaced into something very different. ’The pure work‘, claims Mallarmb, ‘implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the a ‘handing over‘ which now translates irony into an arbitrariness and multiplicity of meaning which is rooted in language itself. The ironic distance which Baudelaire’s poet must place between himself and feminine materiality is now discovered in the structure of language - and here ‘materiality’ denotes not a body to be artistically overcome through representation, but the inseparable ’other’ of the poet’s medium, the figural elements which haunt discourse and gesture toward its outer limits. Lyotard’s discussion in Discours, figure of this aspect of Mallarmd focuses a little predictably on Un Coup de d ts , but the following passage, from the essay on Ballets, in fact gives an equally complex form of the figural, providing, too, another perspective on the feminine as intractable to language:

. . . the ballerina is not u girl dancing; considering the juxtaposition of those group motifs, she is not u girl, but rather a metaphor which symbolizes some elemental aspect of earthly form: sword, cup, flower, etc., and she does not dance but rather, with miraculous lunges and abbreviations, with a bodily writing [une kriture corporelle], she suggests things which the written work could express only in several paragraphs of dialogue or descriptive prose. Her poem is written without the writer’s tools.30

While Baudelaire’s beggar girl is an object to be gazed at from a distance, Mallarmb’s dancer seems to trace a figure which is somehow within language (‘writing with her body’). In fact there is a kind of double articu- lation at work here: first the dancer is disembodied as metaphor, with her gestures coded as signs; then we find that the ’bodily writing’ (kcriture corporelle) which her movement traces is actually exterior to language. On one level, this dance is emblematic of the power of Mallarmban syntax (its ’musicality’), but the real force of the example derives from the insistence that the ’figure’ of the dance suggests a space which is within but not reducible to the regulated spacing of language.3’

Divergences: modernism

The examples discussed above are not intended to imply a general view


of either poet’s work, though we might conclude that Baudelaire’s poem 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 be argued that this version of ’pre-modernism’, with its assumption of some kind of psychological unity within the ironic mode, was the one which came to govern the procedures of much of Anglo-American modernism (though the acknowledged predecessor tended to be Laforgue rather than Baudelaire). Again, it is not that the figural is absent from this writing - indeed it is characteristic of imagism and its derivatives (like the Hemingway style) to seek to make the reader ’feel’ something which eludes under- ~tanding.3~ But the agonistics of this particular avant-garde, and the stress it places on technique as mastery, testify to an assumption that non-signifying effects must be seen to be won from the effort of signification (from the ‘combat of arrangement’, in Pound’s phrase=). This agonistics encodes what Lyotard would think of as a distinctively ‘modern’ temporality of the new as re-transcription (Pound‘s ‘Make it New’, for example). Even Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro‘, one of the few imagist poems to efface the temporal frame of its original perception, was, as he is careful to explain in an account of the poem‘s genesis, the product of numerous rewritings and 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 literary form. In Pound’s case, for example, modernist painting and sculpture offered a way of conceiving of new dynamic structures, where associative and juxtapositional contexts seemed analogous to the ‘organisation of forms’ in a visual art moving toward abstraction (p. 92). Pound’s emphasis is on fom, as the ’composition and symmetry and balance’ of structures (p. 98) which might function to order the flux and chaos of modern phenomenal life. Much of Pound’s writing on the subject is, like that of Wyndham Lewis, directed against the ’accelerated impressionism’ of the Italian Futurists, and his characteristic way of adapting the visual analogy thus hinges on what he calls (after Kandinsky) ‘a language of form and colour’, producing ‘new units of design and new manners of organisation’ (p. 93). Pound’s use of Kandinsky’s Ueber dus Geistige in der Kunst is, however, highly selective, and he seizes on the notion of ’form as the outward expression of inner meaning’ but uses it to very different ends.34 For him, form and ‘pattern’ yield a ‘motif’, and that ’motif’, as Pound discovers it operating in Wyndham Lewis’s work, is characteristically, he says, that of ’the fury of intelligence’ working against the ’circumjacent stupidity’ of a formless modernity.


When we look at developments in continental modernism, the appeal to the visual analogy works very differently and seems to approach more nearly the disruptive effect of Lyotard’s ’figure’. An example might be drawn from German Expressionism, whose divergence from some of the main criteria of Anglo-American modernism can be gauged in terms of Eliot‘s critique of Hamlet. The play, Eliot famously argues, fails to ensure ’the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion’. As Jacqueline Rose has shown, Eliot’s idea that the play is ‘like the sonnets, full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art‘ is closely bound up with an anxiety about the feminine as fundamentally intractable to signification.” Eliot’s commitment to ’objectification’ points up the dissociation between inner and outer, subjective and objective, which is central to his conception of art’s power to transmute the primitive ‘stuff’ of emotion. In producing a ’formula’ or ‘correlative’ for the emotion, art is able to constrain that ’bodily’ affect which Eliot tends to associate with a kind of pathology.

In the early works of Expressionist drama - Oskar Kokoschka’s Murderer, Hope of Women (1907) and Kandinsky’s The Yellow Sound (1909), for example - the emphasis seems quite at odds with that which governs Eliot’s reading of Hamlet. In this theatre we find that narrative indeterminacy and the hyperbolic pitch of emotion conspire to unsettle and exceed representation. These works are in a sense anti-discursive, pledged to thoroughly disruptive and unpredictable effects of sound, colour and gesture - effects which are deliberately in excess of the ‘facts’. And where, for Eliot, sexuality seems to threaten a moment of pure self-presence which blocks Oedipal resolution and escapes formulation in discourse, in these plays a certain negativity attaches to sexuality not because it is intractable to the ’chain’ of representation but because it is already bound by if. To put it another way, sexuality here always exists within a structure, whether it be one of violent opposition (the perennial ’battle of the sexes’) or the Oedipal triangle itself. The ‘chain of events’ which constitutes a correlative for Eliot is precisely what the ’excessive’ modes of these plays strive to disrupt, for to be bound by it is to be bound by the law of secondarity - a law which requires obedience to an absent ‘text’ and which this new theatre constantly works to violate in its struggle to establish itself as ‘event’ rather than narrative, as ’scream’ rather than speech. So, in The Yellow Sound, for example, Kandinsky required the voice to be used ‘pure, i.e., without being obscured by words, or by the meaning of words’.%

Now in one sense these early plays might be said to constitute a ‘modern’ aesthetic as Lyotard describes it, ’an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one’, since their struggle against text and narrative is


partly motivated by a desire for some pre-discursive order of experience. On the other hand, though, these plays seem also to register Lyotard’s postmodern moment (and well before Artaud - whom Lyotard, inciden- tally, calls ’European’ in his desire to reduce Balinese theatre to a system of signs37). We might add to this that Lyotard’s idea of the modern as a retranscription of the postmodern also seems implicit in the evolution of Expressionist theatre which very quickly came to be dominated by the imperatives of narrative and, specifically, by the binding forms of the Oedipal plot. Yet even in the more ‘modern’ phase, plays like Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight are marked by a sort of internal tension, with the closed circuit of the Oedipal text constantly threatened by the irruption of the figural, as the ’excessive’ devices of staging and acting threaten the spatial and temporal limits of the narrative. Here ’good form’ seems always about to mutate into its opposite, to yield something which the structure cannot contain or speak.%

Expressionism, then, might provide some support for Lyotard’s particular notion of the postmodern. And we should note too how important the idea of space is here. For some of these continental modernists, the example of painting provides not ‘a language of colour and form’ so much as a non-semiotic dimension which subverts the order of discourse. This will have to suffice as my example of an ’alternative’ model of modernism, though a fuller account might indicate parallels in French literary Cubism and Russian Futurism.

Divergences: postmodernism

Can we find within contemporary postmodernism any structural parallels to the kind of divergences I have indicated within the earlier forms of modernism? We have it, of course, from Jameson that irony no longer exists in the postmodern, and it is probably true, as Candace Lang has argued in a more considered discussion of this question, that irony as predicated on an intentional subject and a master code has been displaced by the ironic condition of textuality itself (a matter of ‘surfaces’ involving an unresolved plurality of codes and the non-coincidence of signifier and signified39). What I want to suggest here is that in our postmodern we have irony when the possibility of figural disruption seems to recede - or, to put it another way, that irony becomes a necessary product of that view of the contemporary world which sees it as thoroughly assimilated to a model of discourse. For writers like Donald Barthelme and Jean Baudrillard, who will provide my examples here, the ‘real’ is conceived of as pervasively ’textual‘ or semiotic - a perspective that remains within Lyotard’s sense of


the ’modern’ as closed narrative, but which Jameson can also construe as ’spatial’ because a sense of motivating historical development appears to have been lost.40

There is a short story by Barthelme which is very apposite here. Called ‘Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel’, it deploys, like much of Barthelme’s work, a variety of styles and formal disjunctions. In the central section the narrator is trying to decide whether Kierkegaard in his book on The Concept of Irony was fair to Schlegel, whose novel Lucinde Kierkegaard took as an example of the dangerous effects of irony. One of the key contentions the narrator discovers in Kierkegaard’s text is this: ‘Irony deprives the object of its reality when the ironist says something about the object that is not what it means’; ‘Irony becomes an infinite absolute negativity. ’‘* Schlegel’s novel is described as ’poetic’ by Kierkegaard because, in the narrator’s words, ‘By negating the historical actuality poetry quote opens up a higher actuality, expands and transfigures the imperfect into the perfect, and thereby softens and mitigates that deep pain which would darken and obscure all things unquote page 312‘ (p. 165). What Kierkegaard wants, though, is ’not a victory over the world but a reconciliation with the world’. He is, from the narrator’s point of view, unfair to Schlegel insofar as such a ‘reconciliation’ offers no way of defamiliarising the world for perception.@ Barthelme seems to be saying that the ironic perspective offers the only way of seeing the world afresh - that is, of subordinating the exterior to discourse. This rather imperial claim for fiction may remind us of Baudelaire’s treatment of the beggar girl, especially as another strand of the story indulges in a manipulative voyeuristic fantasy about a girl on a train (she too is ‘made over’ in the story, with the narrator changing his account of her clothing at various points in the narrative).

For a more self-consciously postmodern development of this theme we might turn to Jean Baudrillard’s America. Here the ironic observer experi- ences America as ’the marvellously affectless succession of signs’.43 If the desert seems to supply an experience of the sublime it is because it offers a supreme instance of the ‘non-referential’ (p. 10). Here, speculates Baudrillard, it might be fitting to offer a woman to the desert as sacrificial victim (‘If something has to disappear,’ he says, ’something matching the desert for beauty, why not a woman?’, p. 66). And why not, since woman has already been sacrificed to the ’worldly semiology’ of ’empty signs’ (p. 10) which is America - a society in which sexuality has apparently yielded to ’gender’, a sign-system of appearances rather than a pattern of drives and desires. ’Pushed to its logical conclusions, ’ muses Baudrillard, ’this would leave neither masculine nor feminine, but a dissemination of individual sexes referring only to themselves, each one managed as an


independent enterprise. The end of seduction, the end of difference . . .’ This thoroughly ‘textual’ projection is now probably the dominant way

of conceiving of the postmodern and it seems to have some connection to the earlier ‘discursive’ moments of modernism which I have already sketched. Might Lyotard’s theory of the postmodern offer an alternative, a way of thinking the relation of discourse and its other which avoids the circularity and empty ‘indifference’ of Baudrillard’s view? There is, indeed, a body of recent American fiction for which the world and its histories are not reducible to signification. This is not to argue for some naive realism against Baudrillard’s scepticism, but rather to suggest that the spatial model used by Baudrillard and Jameson is closely tied to the synchronic order of signification, to sign-systems. In contrast, another form of postmodernism has turned its attention very deliberately to questions of temporality and narrative, and specifically to what Lyotard has called the ‘event‘, the singular moment which can be spoken about only after it is over, and which is composed of ’simultaneous and heterogeneous tempor- alities’.44 The event is, in this sense, a kind of temporal figure which can‘t be incorporated into a dialectic or reduced to a ’meaning’ within a historical narrative of equivalent other meanings (the time of the history narrated is not that of the narration itself). Lyotard’s most powerful example is, of course, Auschwitz, an event which can’t be remembered (as a simple historical ‘fact’) but which can’t be forgotten either.

Now if the postmodern is that which registers an ‘event’, then we certainly do have a postmodern literature whose subject-matter is obsessively concerned with such cataclysmic ’disruptions’, from slavery, through the Second World War and Vietnam and, no doubt, beyond. And even on a less obviously momentous scale, it often seems that a recognisable world can now be explored only by the kind of ‘working through’ or anamnesis which Lyotard connects with the postmodern. A passage in Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual might seem to signal this:

. . . he began to think of the tranquil life of things, of crockery chests full of wood shavings, of cartons of books, of the harsh Iight of bare bulbs swinging on their wires, of the slow installation of furniture-and objects, of the slow adaptation of the body to space, that whole sum of minute, nonexistent, untellable events . . . all those infinitesimal gestures in which the life of a flat is always most faithfully encapsulated, and which will be upset from time to time by the sudden - unforeseen or ineluctable, tra ’c or benign, ephemeral

What Perec evokes here is something very different from the more familiar textualised sense of postmodem reality, locked in a perpetual present of

(p. 47).

or definitive - fractures of an ahistorical daily grind. %


empty signification. The past has its undecidability - the events which comprise it are largely ’untellable’ - but that does not mean that it is closed to us. Recent American novels like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Jayne Anne Phillips’ Machine Dreams and (yes, even) the works of E. L. Doctorow test@ to this, and to the need constantly to ’work through’ the meaning of the modern in order to disrupt it by multiple, conflicting narratives.

This is a dimension for which Jameson’s techno-space makes no pro- vision, one where narrative becomes the medium in which a number of histories can be thought simultaneously. Here a lost history is literally unpresentable and can be worked through only in the jarring moment when discourse, confronted by what Phillips calls ’some lost place still existing alongside this one‘,& is unable to give a full account. Thus, for example, Morrison’s ghostly Beloved exists as a kind of figural disruption within the historical narrative of slavery (she is at once Sethe’s dead child and an African lost at sea).47

It is perhaps not fanciful to connect this kind of fiction back to the more ‘figural’ moments of modernism, for in their various ways these very different forms of writing all seek to disrupt from within the discourse of the modern, as Lyotard defines it. And if the dominant mode of that disruption has changed - from a spatial to a temporal one - that might offer us not only a possible reversal of Jameson’s developmental schema, but, more importantly, a way of conceiving of postmodernism as something other than ’capitalism itself in its latest systemic mutation’ (p. 343) - as something whose yoking together of incommensurable times and spaces offers an alternative to Jameson‘s finally too ’modern’ postmodern, where ’the Utopia of a renewal of perception has no place to go’ (p. 122).

Notes

A version of this paper was given at the University of Glasgow in February 1991. Special thanks to Sandra Kemp for arranging that session and to all who took part in the discussion which followed. 1 am also grateful to Richard Godden, Alan Sinfield and David Trotter for their comments. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

1 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 343, 310. Further references will be given in the text. ‘Postmodemism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Reuim, 146 (July-August 1984), pp. 53-92. The essay has been slightly revised for inclusion in the new volume. In a footnote (p. 419), Jameson seems to hedge on this categorisation, arguing that ‘cyberpunk’ may be ’the supreme l i t emy expression if not of post-

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modernism, then of late capitalism itself’. Since Jameson has already equated postmodemism with ’capitalism itself’ (p. 343) it is difficult to gauge the force of this distinction. See also p. 321 for a further commendation of Gibson’s work. Jameson’s terminology here draws on that of Linda Hutcheon: see the discussion of ’historiographic metafiction’ in her The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). The reference is to Perry Anderson, ‘Modernity and Revolution‘, New Lej? Review, 144 (March-April 1984), p. 105. For an opposite view, see my ‘Futurism, gender and theories of postmodernity’, Textual Practice, 3, 2 (Summer 1989), pp. 202-21 and ’Consumer Poetics: a French Episode’, New Formations, 13 (Spring 1991), pp. 75-90. See, for example, Susan Rubin Suleiman, ’Naming and Difference: Reflections on ”Modernism versus Postmodernism” in Literature’, in Douwe Fokkema and Hans Bertens (eds.), Appmching Postmodernism (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986), pp. 255-70. Jean-Franqois Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliquk aux enfants: Correspondunce 1982-1985 (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1986), p. 46. Jean-Franqois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 79. Bill Readings, lntroducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. xxxii. The Postmodem Condition, p. 81. Jean-Franqois Lyotard, Des dispositifs pulsionnels (1973; Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1980), pp. 55-6. Foreword to Lyotard, The Postmodem Condition, pp. xvi-xvii. Cf. Postmod- ernism, p. 60 for a similar sense of Lyotard’s desire for ‘the triumphant reappearance of some new high modernism’. Le Postmoderne exptiquk aux enfants, p. 126. J. Laplanche and J.-8. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books), p. 488. Freud’s main essay on the topic is ’Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’, Standard Edition, 24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), XII, 147-56. Le Postmoderne explquC aux enfants, p. 125. Geoff Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 69. Jean-Franqois Lyotard, Discours, figure (1971; Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1985), p. 32. lntroducing Lyotard, p. mi. Readings, lntroducing Lyotard, p. 151. As Readings also notes (p. 21), ’the materiality of the signifier is its otherness to signification . . . a resistance to conceptual representation’. Hence Lyotard’s critique of Hegel’s project for aiming to show that ‘exteriority, that of the sensible, is interior, is a discourse, a dialectic, interior to language‘ (Discours, figure, p. 49). Discours, figure, p. 64. But see Scott Lash, ‘Discourse or Figure? Postmodernism as a “Regime of Signification”’, Theory, Culture and Society, 5, 2-3 (1988), p. 313; ‘. . . I shall argue that modernist culture signifies in a largely “discursive” way, while postmodemist signification is importantly ”figural”. ‘


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See Valery Larbaud, ’Trois Belles Mendiantes’, in Robert Mallet and G. Jean- Aubry (eds.), Oeuvres complttes de V a l t y Larbaud (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), t.8, pp. 323-40. For the text of ‘A une mendiante rousse’, see Claude Pichois (ed.), Charles Baudelaire: Oeuvres complttes, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) I, 83-85. See, for example, Charles DedCyan, Le Nouveuu ma1 de sitcle (Paris: Soci6t6 d’enseignement superieur, 1968), p. 117. For the ironic view, see Candace D. Lang, IronylHumor: Critical Paradigms (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins,

Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Harmonds- worth: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 421. Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, p. 161. See also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ’L’impresentable’, Pot!tique, 21 (1975),

Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (London: Macmillan, 1990),

Roland Barthes, SlZ: A n Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974)‘ pp. 44-5. Variations sur un sujet, in Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (eds.), Mallamt; Oeuvres complttes (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 366. Ma1larmt:Oeuvre.s complttes, p. 304; Bradford Cook (trans.), Mallarmt: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1956), p. 62 (translation modified). See also Jean Starobinski, Portrait de l’artiste en sultimbanque (Geneva: Skira, 1970), p. 64, and Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 223. Cf. Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event, p. 67. See also Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (1969; London: Athlone Press, 1990), p. 136: ’The event is the identity of form and void. It is not the object as denoted, but the object as expressed or expressible, never present, but always already in the past and yet to come. As in Mallarme‘s works, it has the value of its own absence or abolition, since this abolition (abdicatio) is precisely its position in the void as the pure Event (dedicatio).’ Italics in the original. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 58. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Bneska: A Memoir (1916; Hessle: The Marvell Press, lW), p. 121. Further references will be given in the text. For the different focus of Kandinsky’s aesthetic, see below, p. 11. Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986),

The Blaue Reiter Almanac, ed. Klaus Lankheit (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), p. 206. Des dispositifs pulsionnels, p. 93. For a detailed account of these aspects of Expressionism, see my ‘Sexuality and Structure: Tensions in Early Expressionist Drama’, New Theatre Quarterly, 26 (May 1991), pp. 160-70. This notion of ’surfaces’, which derives from Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of irony in The Logic of Sense (especially pp. 134-41), is developed in Candace D. Lang, IronylHumor. See also Gary J. Handwerk, Irony and Ethics in Narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985).

1988), pp. 126-7.

pp. 53-95.

p. 99.

pp. 123-40.


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Jameson describes postmodernity as ‘a wholly textual world’ in ’Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist’, in C. Hosek and P. Parker (eds.), Lyric Poetry: Beyond the Nau Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985),

Donald Barthelme, ’Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel’, Sixty Stories (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982), p. 164. Further references will be given in the text. See Maurice Couturier and RCgis Durand, Donald Barthelme (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), pp. 24-32, and the account of Barthelme’s fiction in Alan Wilde, Horizons of Assent: Modernism, Postmodemism, and the lronic Imagination (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1981). Jean Bauddard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso Books, 1988), p. 5. Further references will be given in the text. Readings, Introducing Lyofard, p. 24. Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (1978; London: Collins Harvill, 1990), p. 128. Jayne Anne Phillips, Machine Dreams (1984; Faber & Faber, 1985), p. 101. Compare Hdegger and ‘the jews’, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 11 for Lyotard’s evocation of ‘A past that is not past, that does not haunt the present, in the sense that its absence is felt, would signal itself even in the present as a specter, an absence, which does not inhabit it in the name of full reality, which is not an object of memory like something that might have been forgotten and must be remembered (with a view to a “good end“, to correct knowledge). It is thus not even there as a ”blank space,” as absence, as terra incognita, but it is there nevertheless.’

p. 255.

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Divergences: modernism, postmodernism, Jameson and Lyotard