Modernism versus Postmodernism: Towards an Analytic Distinction

Abstract

reason and factual subjects, and reality-the latter two terms now taking on a specifically modernist charge. Put otherwise, the trend leading from symbolism to modernism was to confer upon highly particularized signifiers ever more limited access to transcendental signifieds; modernism, in parallel with something like Benjamin's notion of allegory, turns into a thematic difficulty that very access to latent meanings which symbolism took for granted. But This content downloaded from 157.55.39.176 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 07:10:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 76 Poetics Today 12:1 postmodernism deranges the entire symbolist-modernist economy. In complicity with a work like Derrida's Of Grammatology, postmodernism ascribes a sort of transcendental energy to the play of signifiers themselves. And if, for modernism, utopian hopes are spawned by the conflict between word and thing, postmodernism bases the idea of Utopia on a strange new materiality resident in words themselves. The foregoing may seem to contradict my own earlier remarks relating modernism to Habermassian (noncoercive) consensus and postmodernism to Lyotardian (antiterroristic) dissent. But I believe this objection to be superficial. If the modernist project, in order to avoid an empty or idea of Utopia, preserves an Enlightenment separation between words and things, this does not diminish but rather increases the importance of consensus. Consensus, after all, provides a corrective to empty or, worse, terroristic ideas: the larger the community of language users that agrees on a certain way of relating representations to the world, the more likely, at least for that particular community, that other relations between words and things will prove subjective or empty or terroristic. The gap between reference and referent, in fact, drives the dynamic by which consensus forms, then breaks apart, then forms again in seriatim, as evidence against a given representational scheme (local representations it cannot account for) begins to outweigh evidence for that scheme (local representations it can account for). Likewise, if postmodernism, as opposed to modernism, abolishes the gap between reference and referent, and instead invests itself with a sort of material density that is the stuff of Utopia, this in no way implies that dissent is impossible or unimportant. To the contrary, dissent becomes at once present reality and anticipation of the future. Since the postmodernist can no longer appeal to material referents in arbitrating competing representations, such arbitration of competing views itself provides the only grounds for knowledge and for hope. The alternative to dissent is in fact inertia, and death. The materiality that postmodernism confers upon our views themselves suggests that, unless we continually examine and reshape those views, hope will be dissipated in that same hall of mirrors in which reality as such gives way to an infinite montage of simulacra. In the space remaining, I cannot hope to confirm this general model for understanding modernism and postmodernism. This would require nothing less than an extended survey of a significant percentage of the literature grouped under both these categories. Such an undertaking clearly would amount to a book-length study, at the least. However, I believe that I have succeeded in adumbrating broader cultural or conceptual linkages and connections that help account for the undecidability of the modernism/postmodernism debate-as it is This content downloaded from 157.55.39.176 on Sat, 09 Apr 2016 07:10:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Herman Modernism/Postmodernism currently waged. This debate is undecidable precisely because, despite the deceptive appearance of common assumptions, the debaters define in different ways such crucial terms as representation and progress. Supporters of cultural modernism, given their presuppositions about words and things, cannot help but base their utopian aspirations on consensus. Conversely, supporters of postmodernism, given their assumptions about the materiality of representations, cannot help but invest sheer disagreement with a sort of exhilarating, even transcendental, energy. We cannot hope to bring to a peaceable end a discussion in which the participants think they share a single vocabulary, but actually do not. We can merely stake out the grounds for conflict. In what follows, I shall focus on Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Herr's Dispatches (1978) in order to make, in the context of literature itself, some first, rough indications of the subtle shifts in vocabulary that I have described in the context of theory. I do not mean to suggest that these indications amount to proof for my overall argument; I offer them merely to make that argument seem perhaps slightly less abstract.