From: rooney@cheshire.oxy.edu (Michael Sean Rooney)
Subject: Re: YOU PEOPLE ARE MORONS
Followup-To: alt.postmodern
Summary: "postmodernism" has problems
Keywords: postmodernism as reflexivity
Organization: Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041 USA.
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 22:42:45 GMT

In article <92276.133520DXZ102@psuvm.psu.edu> <DXZ102@psuvm.psu.edu> writes:
>Now that I have  your photoreceptors....I have been reading this group's stuff
>for a few weeks now,  and I have concluded that very few of you actually know
>what "postmodern" means.  Not to read like an asshole,  but many of you have
>been using the alt.postmodern forum to blather on about politics or personal
>mindcrap and I'm sort of bored. 

	Alt.postmodern is a very pluralistic group.  It used to house
cascades, and is still an occasional back-alley for bizarre impudence
of all sorts, especially of the crossposted variety.  There are also 
more than a couple people who post general questions of aesthetics, 
literary studies, hermeneutics, and even what is commonly considered
"postmodern" theory (e.g., Lyotard, Jameson).  It's also the hatching
ground for Kibo's postbozoticism and Richard Carlson's speculations on
psychosociology, as well as one of Gordon Fitch's prime pastures.  I
suspect there are still a few of the postmodern music fans lurking here
too.  And net.personalities like the estimable Tom Maddox and the smug
M. Zeleny keep watch as well.  I enjoy the variety; if nothing else,
the postmodern is diverse (besides which, it's a quiet group).

>Now, Postmodernism started as a literary movement in the early 60s and has
>continued until the present.

	Now, before you get ahead of yourself, the origin of the term 
`postmodern' has been a topic of discussion many times hitherto on this
group.  (Did you think we never talked about this before?)  Toynbee used
it in the 1930s to describe developments in architecture.  As you note, 
literati adopted it later, but I'm not sure when.  Certainly many authors
who have come to be gathered together as postmodern were writing in the
50s (e.g., Burroughs) and early 60s (Pynchon).  But when people started
thinking of/calling these writers "postmodern" is another question
entirely.  I don't think it happened until the mid-70s, and it didn't
start to hit other academic fields (e.g., the Geistwissenschaft) until
the 80s (Lyotard's Condition Postmoderne was published in `79).

>   Postmodernism,  as a literary movement, held that all the old stories had
>been told and that nothing could be done to "make it new." So authors like
>Barth and Craine decided to make fiction self-reflexive,  that is,  fiction
>about fiction.  The stories dealt with the authors themselves, and their
>attempts to change the way ficion is written 

	Reflexivity as literary technique has been around for thousands
of years (check out Eschenbach's Parzival).  Postmodernism as literary
movement, i.e., something invented by interpreters seeking to classify
their contemporary favorites, is, I think, an example of what Gordon Fitch
has called "movementism": the creation of an aesthetic category or 
"movement" to give the cultural elite (i.e., people who consciously like
to consider themselves `cultured') something to chat about, or (to give
it a Marxian angle) the commodification of culture and aesthetics.

>Thus painting became self-reflexive.

	I'm not qualified to competently discuss contemporary visual
art, but your brief history which I have excised reeks of programmatic
summary.  

>   The television medium,  like the canvass went through the same process.

	Again, reflexivity is nothing new.  I wonder what Richard Carlson
would make of Nixon's appearance on Laugh-In and its implications for the    
blurring of the lines between fictional and political characters.  "Moon-    
lighting" was a manifestation of postmodernism at its height, percolating    
up to pop media in the mid-80s.

>   Now my question to anyone who recognises this working definition of post-
>modern, is: how does the concept of self-reflexiveness,  the essence of post-
>modernism, translate into other mediums of expression?politics?; philosophy?;
>daily life in general?

	Frankly, it is this definition of postmodernism which I find
most intellectually trivial, aesthetically limited, and politically
pernicious.  I will provide an example of how this "translates" into
other mediums: take Baudrillard's monumental decline from an interesting
Marxian sociologist to a blathering buffoon from the 70s on, culminating
in his much-vilified claim in January 1991 that the Iraq War would 
"never happen" and instead be an ongoing succession of video simacrula.
It wasn't as boneheaded as Christopher Norris has claimed, but it was 
still a remarkably stupid assertion.  The orgy of reflexivity all-too
often becomes a one-way ticket for quick dismissal of both coherent
conceptual systems (impossible, says the diehard postmodernist) and the
ugliness of the material world (impossible to conceptualize, isn't it
more fun to reflect endlessly?).  This is the solid chunk of truth
behind Habermas' critique of the postmodern, for all its considerable
specific errors: postmodernism as reflexivity is a banal resurrection
of skepticism which coincides neatly with socio-political conservatism.

>   I'm very interested in postmodernism because I feel that we're in the midst
>of a very interesting and open-ended conceptual movement.

	Open-ended?  Remember what happened to "Moonlighting".

Cordially,

Michael S. Rooney