---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 20 Feb 1994 08:32:23 -0800 From: Mark Tribe To: "Kent D. Palmer, Ph.D." Subject: Re: Call for Work ________________________________ Postmodern Time Copyright 1993 Mark Tribe. All rights reserved. Modernism has many definitions. In "Modernist Painting," Clement Greenberg finds the origin of modernism in the "immanent criticism" of Kant. Defining modernism as "the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself-not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence," he insists that "[m]odernism has never meant anything like a break with the past. It may mean a devolution, an unraveling of anterior tradition, but it also means its continuation... Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our times than the idea of a rupture of continuity."1 For Greenberg, Modernism is a diacritical practice that is inherently progressive: it builds on the past and moves forward into the future. Like modernism, postmodernism has many definitions and is applied to diverse objects. Jean-Francois Lyotard describes the postmodern condition as a collapse of narratives of legitimation, as "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," yet remains "undoubtedly part of the modern."2 Susan Suleiman gives a particularly useful definition. In the introduction to Subversive Intent she writes: "I interpret [postmodernism] as that moment of extreme (perhaps tragic, perhaps playful) self-consciousness when the present -our present-takes to reflecting on its relation to the past and to the future primarily as a problem of repetition. How does one create a future that will acknowledge and incorporate the past-a past that includes, in our very own century, some of the darkest moments in human history-without repeating it?"3 The very name we are giving to this curious condition is indicative of its conflicted relation to the past. If modernism is taken to represent a history that stretches behind us, then this new word, (formed byent rom modernism. This apparently paradoxical situation appears again and again as postmodern theory attempts to wrangle with given binarisms: subject/object, space/time, ideal/material, mind/body, nature/culture, essence/context (to name just a few). In each case, where there used to be a clear-cut distinction we find a collapse. Yet within the collapsed structure lies a field of differences. Like the first person in Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, it is "an infinitely hot and dense dot."4 The historical practice of Michel Foucault exemplifies this complexity, in that it is imbricated in modernist historiography as it undermines it. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault identifies Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as a metaphor for and effect of the distributions of power in eighteenth century France. "The Panopticon... must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relatthat works "from the ground up," their relation to science is distinct. A further distinction may be drawn between Foucault's emphasis on the micropolitical, "based on a reactivation of local knowledges"15 and Marx's interest in politics on the macroscopic scale of class struggle. And where Foucault focuses relentlessly on the past and present, Marx allows himself to imagine the fut Fredrick Jameson provides an account of the postmodern that is less complicated than the one I am describing here in terms of its relation to that which preceded it. In "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," he describes postmodernism as a discrete historical epoch that began in the United States with the post-war economic boom. For ontestation. It is implicated by the modern as it resists it. It is this complex and fraught relation to modernism that qualifies Foucault's project as a postmodern one. Fredrick Jameson provides an account of the postmodern that is less complicated than the one I am describing here in terms of its relation to that which preceded it. In "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," he describes postmodernism as a discrete historical epoch that began in the United States with the post-war economic boom. For ontestation. It is implicated by the modern as it resists it. It is this complex and fraught relation to modernism that qualifies Foucault's project as a postmodern one. Fredrick Jameson provides an account of the postmodern that is less complicated than the one I am describing here in terms of its relation to that which preceded it. In "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," he describes postmodernism as a discrete historical epoch that began in the United States with the post-war economic boom. For ontestation. It is implicated by the modern as it resists it. It is this complex and fraught relation to modernism that qualifies Foucault's project as a postmodern one. Fredrick Jameson provides an account of the postmodern that is less complicated than the one I am describing here in terms of its relation to that which preceded it. In "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," he describes postmodernism as a discrete historical epoch that began in the United States with the post-war economic boom. For ontestation. It is implicated by the modern as it resists it. It is this complex and fraught relatiom thinking here particularly of technologies of electronic representation and communication such as television, telephony, computing and digital imaging. These technologies are both manifestations and producers of postmodernity. Lyotard writes: "Technology is not the cause of the decline of the modern figure; rather, it is one of its signs."23 Much as political-economy and cultural conditions produce eachother in a simbiotic relation, technologies and the social field are engaged in a circular dynamic. By increasing the speed of communications, new technologies participate in a collapse of spatial distances. As schizophrenia, the postmodern condition is both a problem of space-time and a crisis of subjectivity. The modern conception of the human subject as a wils and are grouped by shared interests and communication styles. I have described postmodernim as an implosion of binary relations into a dense and uncertain field of shifting differences. This collapse is reproduced as a crisis of subjectivity and a problem of time. Much of the popular discussion of the new technologies of electronic communication is focused on the future. What impact in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." From Illuminations. Schocken Books, NY, 1969. -p. 221 30 Roland Barthes: "From Work to Text." From Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Brian Wallis, ed. The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, 1984. Mark Tribe UCSD Visual Art Department La Jolla, California.