Postmodern Mode Research Articles

Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing Judy Lochhead (bio) Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing. Edited by Andrew Dell'Antonio. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 344 pp. My assignment for this review—one that I happily accepted—was to consider Beyond Structural Listening?: Postmodern Modes of Hearing from the perspective of feminist theory and music. While neither the book nor any of its essays save one makes explicit claims relating to feminist thought, there is good reason to expect that some of the major themes of the essays intersect with current issues in feminist philosophy, aesthetics, and social theory. As [End Page 111] the title suggests, several essays in the book are informed by postmodern thought, in which feminist theory has been a central if not dominant strand.1 However, feminist theory has had neither an easy nor a simple relation to certain strands of postmodern thought—a relation that may be observed in this anthology as well. In his introductory essay, editor Andrew Dell'Antonio articulates four threads that run through the nine essays of the book. Three of these are easily familiar to feminist theory: control, power, and the body. The fourth common strand, listening and the musical "text," framed with specific reference to music, may be understood to comprehend issues of subjectivity and experience—frequent topics in feminist theory. While it is possible to see the broad outlines of feminist thought shimmering through the common strands of these essays, none of the essays except for Tamara Levitz's "The Chosen One's Choice" thematize gender and the broader topic of difference it implies. No book or author can realistically take up all issues or perspectives, and hence it would be disingenuous to criticize this book for failing to address gender and difference more broadly and thematically. My task here is to explain why one of the central strands of postmodern thought broadly conceived does not make much of a showing. Others have taken note of this absence. Ethnomusicologist Ellen Koskoff has recently observed that postmodern theory often ignores women.2 Koskoff's argument is primarily focused on her diagnosis of why gender and sexuality are less frequently categories of concern in ethnomusicological as opposed to musicological studies, but as part of her thesis she includes observations on how some strands of postmodern theory effectively ignore women. Building on the work of feminists from various fields, Koskoff notes that the destabilization of modern epistemological categories that is the hallmark of postmodern theory often results in abstractions that make individuals—and women in particular—disappear. The particularities of lived experience are subsumed into abstractions and generalities in a conceptual move that replicates the universalizing tendencies of modern thought. Philosopher Linda Alcoff has also recently protested the exclusion of feminist thought from the broader discipline of philosophy. In her essay "Philosophy Matters: A Review of Recent Work in Feminist Philosophy" Alcoff argues that while feminist thought "disrespects the disciplinary borders and traditional metaphilosophical assumptions that have framed contemporary Western philosophy," it should be "seen as philosophy per se."3 As these two authors observe, well into the twenty-first century the topics of gender and difference have not been fully integrated into disciplinary thinking of various sorts. I return to this general issue after considering in some detail the various essays in this collection and how the ideas of its authors either do contribute or might have contributed to broader issues of feminist thought. First, some statistics. In table 1 I list the authors of the collection by gender; the numbers following each name indicate the length of the essay.4 Table 1 shows that there are seven essays by men (I count both of the editor's contributions as one) and three by women, one an afterword by Rose Rosengard Subotnik, the author who initially drew attention to a concept of "structural listening" in her thoroughgoing critique. Robert Fink has by far the longest essay, surpassing Tamara Levitz by six pages. Most of the essays run about twenty-five to thirty pages, [End Page 112] but both Paul Attinello and Elisabeth Le Guin have relatively short essays at nineteen pages. Dell'Antonio's introductory...

Melancholy Without the Other

Over the course of its history, psychoanalysis has adopted various metaphors to express its understanding of the mind. Originally drawn to a “depth” model that echoed the revolutionary dynamics of the early 20th century, it shifted after World War II to a more relational account that was attuned to the social problematic of how to feel “real” and secure. This relational account has turned into a mode of postmodernism that emphasises the productive nature of language and the importance of democratising the therapeutic process. Included in this is an awareness of otherness as something to be both recognised and bridged. This article reviews these trends and argues that although the theoretical and ethical advances of this kind of postmodern psychoanalysis are real, there is also a continuing danger of reducing otherness to something colonisable. Levinas's (1985) “impossible” attitude toward the other as unknowable and primary is set up as an alternative principle through which it is suggested that what psychoanalysis might seek to preserve is that which is irreducibly other.

The Ambivalent Paintings of Judy Watson

This paper takes as its starting point Vivien Johnson's claim that the paintings of Judy Watson (1959-) privilege emotion and resist a 'cognitive bias' common to a wide range of discourses on Aboriginal painting, tradition-based and otherwise. This claim will be tested through a close reading of four works - the guardians (1986-1988), internal landscape (1994), heartland (1991) and shoal (1998) - which, it will be argued, frame embodied identity and spirituality in Aboriginal and feminine-specific terms. Johnson identifies in Watson's paintings a feminist strategy of privileging emotion to evoke a 'felt, rather than thought, connectedness' to Aboriginal countiy and artistic tradition. While Johnson posits an implicit opposition between emotion and thought, contrasting Watson's paintings with more overtly political works by Aboriginal artists who have adopted the 'approved 'quotational' mode of Post-modernism,' this essay will argue that the political aesthetic of the four works in question is located in their capacity to generate ambivalent moods and modes of thought.

Moving Comparison out of the Scholar's Laboratory

This essay attempts a brief ethnography of our field impelled by the aftermath of September 11, 2001. My purpose is to ask if the current state of the debate over comparison addresses a growing reality on the ground. Whether or not we engage in comparison, the public does. Whether or not we are willing to place one religion in the context of another, globalization and a network of migration does. On a street corner in Chapel Hill, I overheard an antiwar demonstrator, dressed in a good imitation of the 1960s style, provide his audience with a crash course in Islam, explaining that killing these people is pointless because they really do not value life in quite the same way, because, after all, they believe in a heaven. Such public discourse on comparison is not new, but we seem to pay little attention to it as we shake our heads and go on with our own internal debate over the nature of comparison within Religious Studies. This debate was begun in many ways in the early 1980s by Jonathan Z. Smith, but is now impelled by a series of real and perceived critiques of more threatening outsiders labeled as Postmodernists. After two decades of discomfort and malaise, of whispered and even shouted anger at POMOrhetoric, the defenses, the recanta tion—even incantations—are now finally committed to writing in the last three years. Norman Giradot provides a good summary of the feelings of many of the now older generation during two decades of sustained critique of comparison in the mode of postmodernism:

Teatrališkumo būvis : postmodernizmo pavidalai šiuolaikiniame Lietuvos teatre

The Lithuanian theatre of the last decades has experienced numerous changes, especially dea ling with the most important elements of theatri cal performance: the text, the actor, and the spec tator. The object of the present research is the emerging postmodern representations in contem porary Lithuanian theatre of the last two decades. Special attention is paid to the recent develop ments that can be conceptualized in the frame work of postmodern and poststructural theory. Theatre critics are still debating about the influence of poststructuralism in performing arts, focusing mainly on the transformation of theatre from a marginal art form to the cultural metaphor, wide ly used by cultural theorists across the discipli nes. The question remains thought how this pro liferation of theatrical and performative metap hors challenges the traditional definitions of "the atre" or "performance". The change of the status of theatre in society, together with the theatricali zation of everyday life and the mediatization of culture by new technologies, suggest not only the redundancy of theatre in the contemporary Lithu anian society, but also a considerable shift in the function of its aesthetics. The new forms of representation in the Lithua nian theatre are closely linked with tradition as well as various influences from outside, which, in turn, form a kind of hybrid character of contempo rary performances. The main task of this research is the definition and analysis of postmodern mo des of representation in the contemporary Lithu anian theatre. These tendencies are closely linked together and deal with the transformation of the notions of language, body and perception in con temporary culture and critical theory. In this article, the self-reflexive nature of the Lithuanian theatre is explored in order to define and analyse the main reasons and implications of this postmodern strategy. The apprehension of the impossibility for innovations as well as the limits of traditional means of representation force contemporary theatre creators to question and re discover the status of theatre in the postcommu nist society. As the traditional notion of "theatre" is being transformed by changes in the socio-eco nomic situation, new technologies and popular culture, theatre artists are looking back at the past performances, theatre and cultural history, "non classical" forms of narration as well as the media and popular culture in order to investigate and challenge romantic and modern models of repre sentation. Theatre reflects and deconstructs its own past; it is from itself, its own substance that theatre proliferates by imitating, repeating, parodying, retracting its own representational devises. However, while analysing the new tendency towards self-reflexivity in the Lithuanian theatre, one has to move away from formalistic labels to more complex sociocultural contexts that influence these transformations as well as acknowledge the complex dialectic of disruption and reinven tion, produced by this kind of performances. A closer reading will find them concerned with nar rative frames and mental systems that subvert the traditional sense of meaning and perception in theatre. Postmodern self-reflexive strategies, present in the contemporary Lithuanian theatre, can be defi ned as resistance to the traditional constructions of reality and are conditioned by the following factors: the changes that occur in the notions of art, reality, representation, subject, and percep tion and are influenced by postmodern and po ststructural theories; the importance of theoreti cal reflection; the crises of the modern cult of innovation and the idea of progress; the theatrica lity of the contemporary cultural situation; the influence of the media, popular culture and new technologies and the shift in the role of the theatre in the transitional Lithuanian society. Self-reflexi ve strategies challenge the inherited modes of the atrical representation in at least two ways: dis turbing theatre means of expression and broader cultural assumptions about theatre. The Lithua nian theatre critics have been slow in recognising the possibility of the critical importance of self reflexive techniques, discussing them as a forma listic exercise, rather than an ideological/critical response to a crisis of credibility, faced by theatre during the last two decades. In fact, what is created by those strategies is the theatre questioning its ontology (presence, liveness), its means of repre sentation, and its aura of authenticity, authority and originality.

The Aesthetics of Refusal: Pinter among the Radicals

As the modernity of modem drama recedes, historiography plays an increasingly central role in the discipline. The lexicon of postfeminism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism suggests that the ideological sands have shifted. The "modem condition" is no longer self-evident; the old structures of feeling, to borrow Raymond Williams's phrase, are no longer felt in the same way. The political contexts of modern drama are especially prone to erasure. Links between artistic practice and social commitment in many ways define the modern theatre, yet radical works often survive as purely aesthetic artifacts. Poised near the endpoint of the modern canon, Harold Pinter's career provides an exemplary nexus for dramatic historiography. Aesthetically, his works span modem and postmodern modes of cultural production. On the one hand, Pinter is arguably the last of the modern dramatists — a late practitioner of literary absurdism, in Martin Esslin's influential account. At the same time, Pinter has actively written for television and film, depreciating his literary status while immersing himself in commercial culture.

Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic

In a February 1966 letter to her artistic confidant, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop tellingly grouped four poets: Lowell, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, and herself. For Bishop--always wary of being pigeonholed and therefore reticent about naming her favorite contemporaries--it was a rare explicit acknowledgment of an informal but enduring artistic circle that has evaded the notice of literary journalists for more than forty years. Despite the private nature of their dialogue, the group's members--Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, and Berryman--left a compelling record of their mutual interchange and influence. Drawing on an extensive range of published and archival sources, Thomas Travisano traces these poets' creation of a surprisingly coherent postmodern aesthetic and defines its continuing influence on American poetry.The refusal of this midcentury quartet, as Travisano calls them, to voice a formalized doctrine, coupled with their intuitive way of working, has caused critics to miss the coherence of their project. Travisano argues that these poets are not only successors to Pound, Auden, Stevens, and Eliot but postmodern explorers in their own right. In forging their own aesthetic, characterized here as a postmodern mode of elegy, they encountered significant resistance from their immediate modernist mentors Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Marianne Moore.Jarrell, whom others of the group regarded as a critic of particular genius, was first described as a post-modernist in a 1941 review by Ransom that Travisano cites as the earliest known use of the term. In Jarrell's review of Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle six years later, he named Lowell a postmodernist and identified traits, among them the use of pastiche, that are now considered by theorists such as Fredric Jameson as specifically postmodern. And Bishop's inventiveness allowed her to adapt a self-exploratory mode often, but imprecisely, termed confessional to challenging forms such as the double sonnet, villanelle, and sestina.Each of these poets suffered a devastating loss during childhood and lived through the twentieth-century disasters of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust, and the cold war. The continual tension in their poetry between subjectivity and form, claims Travisano, reflects the plight of the fractured individual in a postmodern world. By arguing so sharply for the importance of this circle, Midcentury Quartet is certain to redraw the map of postwar American poetry.

Prospects for thinking reconstruction postmetaphysically: Postmodernism minus the quote‐marks

Several accounts of postmodernist theories define them as discourses in quotation marks thus shifting the emphasis from reconstruction to deconstruction. Without contesting the import of deconstructive philosophy and Derrida's intervention in particular, in this essay I defend reconstruction and propose it as a mode of postmodernism that is compatible or even complementary with discursive strategies of quote‐mark use. By drawing on Albrecht Wellmer's and Klaus Eder's ideas, I introduce a definition of postmodernism as postmetaphysical thinking and explore some basic metaphysical tenets about subjectivity, reason, language, and human nature as characteristic of the modern era and by no means endemic in thought. I argue that this attempt uncouples reconstruction from metaphysics allowing it to regain its philosophical significance and opens new conceptual horizons for understanding reflection and culture.

Academic Professionalism and the Betrayal of the Land-Grant Tradition

Contemporary academic professionalism undercuts the moral imperative of the land-grant tradition in America. The author is primarily concerned with assessing the impact of post-modern modes of thought on both the rise of academic professionalism and the decline of civic engagement at the heart of the land-grant mission. A revitalization of the land-grant tradition, he argues, requires the rebuilding of the social personae of the academic professions not on the logic of commercial free agency or through the spiritually empty traces of theory, but in the language of ethics and through moral praxis.

On Becoming Italian American: An Autobiography of an Ethnic Identity

This article is about growing up Italian in Connecticut after World War II, and the author finding in the 1980s and 1990s that he is supposed to be Italian American, which, to him, is not satisfying to be. The density of family and ethnicity in the first 22 years of the author's life, and how that changed over time, is delineated. The quest for the Ameri can dream, driven by the Newtonian world machine (in both its modern and postmodern modes), has eclipsed the world he grew up in. The author tries to communicate through prose and poetry that what was lost has not been replaced, hasn't even been substituted for. Put over-simply, most of the wine the author now drinks is better than the wine he made with his uncles, grandfather, and cousin. But going to a liquor store is an incredi bly impoverished cultural experience compared to making 200 gallons of wine in one's own cellar.

Murphy on Postmodernity, Science, and Religion

Nancey Murphy claims that a shift in “thinking strategy” from modern to postmodern modes of thought makes it easier to exhibit the intellectual respectability of theology vis‐à‐vis the sciences. Her case for this proposition depends on modernist interests, most notably in systematizing the sciences for reasons that have their origin in Plato's divided line.

Consuming desires: Performing gender in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Neil Jordan's the crying game and sally potter's Orlando

This essays examines how twentieth century queer practices— such as queer literature, queer theory, and queer film— attempt to resist and reconfigure the historical legacy of compulsory homosexuality and the commodification of gender. I begin by tracing the ways in which the eighteenth century discourse on masquerade offered resistance to the limited, culturally sanctioned array of gendered subject positions of the time in order to evaluate the effectiveness of postmodern modes of resisting and reconfiguring gender construction and consumption at the close of the twentieth century. I argue that the postmodern discourse on gender performance improves upon the eighteenth century discourse on masquerade as a strategy for reconceiving resistance to the hegemonic legitimation of compulsory homosexuality, and that by queering our conception of gender construction in this way we may consummate our desire for a wider array of social/ sexual desiring positions without reinscribing them within an unself‐critical consumerism.

Postmodern Double Cross: Reading David Cronenberg's "M. Butterfly" as a Horror Story

David Cronenberg's cinema has received considerable critical attention in recent years not only from film scholars but also from scholars working on contemporary cultural theory, particularly theories of postmodernism. For that latter group of scholars, Cronenberg's films testify to emergence of a postmodern, postgender, and subjectivity. In Terminal Identity, for example, Scott Bukatman reads Cronenberg's cinema in relation to coming out of a new information/space age.' According to Bukatman, Cronenberg's films stage a terminal identity, which refers to a articulation: end of subject and a new constructed at computer station or television screen.' All protagonists in Cronenberg's films, according to Bukatman, signify a in human definition: the loss of power over form of human, visible sign of our being, combines with absence of moral certainties that once guided that power.' What is not sufficiently addressed in Bukatman's analysis is fact that double articulation of subjectivity in Cronenberg's films, which refers to both end of subject and construction of a new postmodern mode of subjectivity, is not a postgender or posthuman phenomenon but is deeply grounded in gender. In Cronenberg's cinema, it is specifically male subject whose unified, coherent, and central status is disturbed and disarticulated. new, decentered, and fluid mode of which signifies a slippage in human definition is also unmistakably male. As Michael O'Pray puts it, The Cronenberg mise-enscene of techno-phantasy upon which his reputation rests-the parasites, growths, visceral invasions of body-is male through and through.' Cronenberg's 1993 film M. Butterfly occupies a particularly interesting place in director's cinema, because for first time he articulates crisis of male subject not only in terms of questions of gender and crisis of modernity but also in terms of questions of race, ethnicity, and imperialism. Unlike some well-known Cronenberg films such as Videodrome (1985), Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), or Naked Lunch (1991), M. Butterfly cannot be categorized within confines of horror and/or science fiction genres. Instead, M. Butterfly

Al was ons ook daar, ons weet dis nie waar nie" - metodologie en geskiedskrywing in postmodernistiese perspektief

In this paper the current methodological cul-de-sac in historiography is examined. Fundamental questions about the methodology, myths and assumptions underlying the writing of history are put forward by linking this discipline to the dynamics inherent in Cultural studies. The author argues in favour of a 'poetics of memory' by pointing out that scientific objectivity, truth and ideology are dependent on the belief, or sensemaking fiction of the subject/researcher. He shows that historical memory constitutes what could be called, in the words of Ricoer, an "identity of culture". In a postmodern mode of thinking, heteroglossia is a way of rethinking history.

From Modern to Postmodern Organizational Analysis

The terms 'modem' and 'postmodern' have become common currency in intel lectual debates within organization studies. The postmodern is variously inter preted as an 'epoch', a 'perspective', or a new 'paradigm' of thought. In this paper the author argues that what distinguishes the postmodern from the modem is a 'style of thinking' which eschews the uncritical use of common organizational terms such as 'organizations', 'individuals', 'environment', 'structure', and 'culture', etc. These terms refer to the existence of social entit ies and attributes within a modernist problematic. This is because a modernist thought style relies on a 'strong' ontology (the study of the nature and essence of things) of being which privileges thinking in terms of discrete phenomenal 'states', static 'attributes' and sequential 'events'. Postmodern thinking, on the other hand, privileges a 'weak' ontology of becoming which emphasizes a transient, ephemeral and emergent reality. From this thought style, reality is deemed to be continuously in flux and transformation and hence unrepresent able in any static sense. Debates about modernism and postmodernism which do not address this ontological distinction miss critical insights which postmod ernism brings to the study of organization. Adopting a postmodern mode of thinking implies radical consequences for rethinking organization studies. Instead of the traditional emphasis on organizations, organizational forms and organizational attributes, what is accentuated is the importance of examining local assemblages of 'organizings' which collectively make up social reality. A postmodern style of thought, therefore, brings with it a different set of onto logical commitments, intellectual priorities and theoretical preoccupations to bear on the study of organization.

Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (review)

378Philosophy and Literature Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature, by Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur; 284 pp. NewYork: Routledge, 1993, $52.50 cloth, $16.95 paper. This book sets out to tackle the formidable corpus of Friedrich Nietzsche from the points ofview ofboth literature and philosophy, to "bring conventionally marked 'philosophic' and 'literary' texts into conversation with one another in a way never done before" (p. 2) . I am not sure the authors are as innovative as they claim—after all, poststructural literary critics are continually straying into the textual territory once clearly marked "philosophic"—but it certainly proves to be a most fruitful enterprise with regard to Nietzsche. The authors' collaboration (Magnus is a philosopher, Stewart and Mileur are teachers of English) offers numerous insights into the vexed relationship of these disciplines, and most substantially, a provocative re-viewing of Nietzsche's eclectic work as—in effect—a complex, even tortuous allegory of writing. With this view in mind, the authors work hard to represent Nietzsche's seminal constructs—Eternal Recurrence, Will to Power, the Übermensch et al.— as so many textual strategies, occasions for the reader, in Roland Barthes's terms, to write herself into the experience of reading. This argument is elaborated through a series of provocative, detailed readings of Towards the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of tL· Idols, and—most exhaustively—Thus Spake Zarathustra. The authors consider a number of pressing Nietzschean issues, including the narrator/speaker's relationship with his readers—"Some are born posthumously," observes Nietzsche modestly in Ecce Homo—the rhetorical tropes and ploys of his writing (chiefly, say the authors, the device of hyperbole) and—in sum—the radical kind of narrative that Nietzsche is writing. For example: in Twilight of the Idols, assert the authors, Nietzsche frustrates our deep-seated desire for narrative closure, creating instead "an alternative definition of the protagonist's place in an unfinished story which no one is writing, about characters with no specifiable or necessary traits, whose destiny cannot be known" (p. 74). In particular, the relation of reader to writing is marked, the authors tell us, by Nietzsche's own implicated sense of the world-as-text: "For Nietzsche seems to look on the world, not securely from without (as if it were a sort of artwork) , but ... as if from within an unfolding text whose alienness we must find a way to make our own" (p. 134). Accordingly, the constructs which Nietzsche "embodies" rather than "expresses" (in the author's terms) are spurs to the imagination of the (attentive, perhaps unborn) reader: "Rhetorically, the questions propounded [in TL· Gay Science or Thus Spake Zarathustra] insinuate that a bland or neutral response ('So who cares?') is impossible. Both fictive representations exclude apathy as an option" (p. 114). One of the most interesting aspects of the book, from the point of view of both philosophic and literary readers, is the "conversation" initiated between Reviews379 Nietzsche and various seminal figures in the English literary tradition. This is not to say that Magnus, Stewart, and Mileur assert "influences" on Nietzsche: they demonstrate, most effectively in some cases, that great literature embodies the complex constructs that Nietzsche is after—that Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence," say, or Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," reveal Eternal Recurrence, or an authorial Will to Power, to be the complex writerly strategies they are. And yet, there are problems with this cheerfully postmodern mode of exegesis. Try and textualize as one might, there are awkward problems for conduct contained in Nietzsche's writings—for example, his characterization of women is more (ethically) disturbing than our authors' rather blithe rhetorical concerns allow—and these problems remain after reading this study. To represent epistemology as literary epiphany reduces Nietzsche's claims to being a philosopher, in the sense of one who engages in serious, sustained attention to the problems of living—outside the text. Magnus, Steward, and Mileur may have given us a Nietzsche who is a marvelous writer—the only begetter of, say, Foucault and Derrida—but they may just have lost us a powerful agent who ventures beyond writing. And that would be a pity. University...

Account and acknowledge, or represent and control? On post-modern politics and economics of collective responsibility

As a practice and a profession, late-modern accounting conceives accountability as representation and control. Post-modern modes of accountability project another practice of accounting that would resist reduction to representation and control. After the fashion of Friedrich Nietzsche, this alternative suggests that accounting “return” to a practical and professional horizon created by such internal goods as narration and acknowledgement. By complementing the economics and politics of representationalism, projects of narration and acknowledgement can gain greater autonomy and integrity for accounting. Especially as accountants address domains outside the modern corporation, these post-modern dimensions of practical accountability become harder to avoid, easier to understand, and better to cultivate.

Grondliggende algoritme vir postmodernisme

Summary In this article it is proposed that a dominant mode of postmodernism be typified as topological. It is argued that topology results from a rejection of legitimation by a Zero‐2 logic, which is seen to underlie postmodernism. In the case of fiction such a rejection implies that the basic principles of traditional fiction, that is, the notions of “mimesis” and the possibility of “self‐sufficient assessment of meaning” are rejected. As a result of such a rejection of “fixed points”, a relativistic shift occurs in modernism whereby the text becomes “floating”. This, in turn, leads to its topological transformation in postmodernism. It is a topology which is generated by the bioptemic system which is inherent to the process of the text. Topology can be explained with reference to the “Klein” form, since this model clearly shows how the topological nature of fiction should be sought in the transgression of borders. Deconstruction of the borders between fiction and reality results in the formation of the topological subject and implicates the process of topological invagination; the blurring of historic and spatial borders leads to the formation of topological zones; even the dialogistic discourses within the text are seen to overlap topologically.

The Ideology of Postmodern Music and Left Politics

The Ideology of Postmodern Music and Left Politics John Beverley This article appeared initially in the British journal Critical Quarterly 31.1 (Spring, 1989). I’m grateful to its editors for permission to reproduce it here, and in particular to Colin MacCabe for suggesting the idea in the first place. I’ve added a few minor corrections and updates. for Rudy Van Gelder, friend of ears Adorno directed some of his most acid remarks on musical sociology to the category of the “fan.” For example: What is common to the jazz enthusiast of all countries, however, is the moment of compliance, in parodistic exaggeration. In this respect their play recalls the brutal seriousness of the masses of followers in totalitarian states, even though the difference between play and seriousness amounts to that between life and death (...) While the leaders in the European dictatorships of both shades raged against the decadence of jazz, the youth of the other countries has long since allowed itself to be electrified, as with marches, by the syncopated dance-steps, with bands which do not by accident stem from military music.1 One of the most important contributions of postmodernism has been its defense of an aesthetics of theconsumer, rather than as in the case of romanticism and modernism an aesthetics of the producer, in turn linked to an individualist and phallocentric ego ideal. I should first of all make it clear then that I am writing here from the perspective of the “fan,” the person who buys records and goes to concerts, not like Adorno from the perspective of the trained musician or composer. What I will be arguing, in part with Adorno, in part against him, is that music is coming to represent for the Left something like a “key sector.” For Adorno, the development of modern music is a reflection of the decline of the bourgeoisie, whose most characteristic cultural medium on the other hand music is.2 Christa Burger recalls the essential image of the cultural in Adorno: that of Ulysses, who, tied to the mast of his ship, can listen to the song of the sirens while the slaves underneath work at the oars, cut off from the aesthetic experience which is reserved only for those in power.3 What is implied and critiqued at the same time in the image is the stance of the traditional intellectual or aesthete in the face of the processes of transformation of culture into a commodity—mass culture—and the consequent collapse of the distinction between high and low culture, a collapse which precisely defines the postmodern and which postmodernist ideology celebrates. In the postmodern mode, not only are Ulysses and his crew both listening to the siren song, they are singing along with it as in “Sing Along with Mitch” and perhaps marking the beat with their oars—one-two, one-two, one-two-three-four. One variant of the ideology of postmodern music may be illustrated by the following remarks from an interview John Cage gave about his composition for electronic tapeFontana Mix (1958): Q.—I feel that there is a sense of logic and cohesion in your indeterminate music. A.—This logic was not put there by me, but was the result of chance operations. The thought that it is logical grows up in you... I think that all those things that we associate with logic and our observance of relationships, those aspects of our mind are extremely simple in relation to what actually happens, so that when we use our perception of logic we minimize the actual nature of the thing we are experiencing. Q.—Your conception (of indeterminacy) leads you into a universe nobody has attempted to charter before. Do you find yourself in it as a lawmaker? A.—I am certainly not at the point of making laws. I am more like a hunter, or an inventor, than a lawmaker. Q.—Are you satisfied with the way your music is made public—that is, by the music publishers, record companies, radio stations, etc.? Do you have complaints? A.—I consider my music, once it has left my desk, to be what in Buddhism would be called...

A Logic of Narrativity

ARRATIVITY may be thought of most simply as the enabling force of narrative, a force that is present at every point in the narrative and thus always operates syntagmatically. In my understanding, the term acquires value insofar as it can be applied to the linear existence of perceivable narrative texts of whatever kind. It follows from this that my understanding is meant to be as comprehensively useful as possible, able to meet the challenge of and serve to illuminate texts that may be either ostensibly conjunctive or radically disjunctive in respect to the worlds they represent, and similarly in respect to the ways in which they choose to represent those worlds. Since every narrative will possess its own form of narrativity, then every narrative should be examinable in the light of this concept. There is an unspoken assumption here that will become clearer in the pages to follow-namely, that to read any narrative with the required fidelity means to read its narrativity. This reading will itself produce a story-the story of narrativity-which will enhance, dramatize, and above all provide a rationale for the story being told. One may distinguish briefly between my approach and the celebrated Russian Formalist one based on their distinction between fabula and sujet, story and discourse.' In the Formalist case one compares a hypothetical entity, the fabula, with an entity having ontological status, the sujet as a finished artifact in Meir Sternberg's words; in my case one concentrates on the latter entity in all its ontological solidity, seeing it both as an aggregation of devices and story events, and as a story in its own right, possessing a syntagmatic logic that cannot be accounted for simply by the identification of narratological features that are taken to constitute a sujet. The Formalist distinction can certainly help to determine the nature of narrativity in the case of novels such as Under Western Eyes and The Good Soldier; however, its degree of applicability becomes questionable when we encounter works whose fabulae seem difficult or impossible to reconstruct, as with novels in the Robbe-Grillet or postmodern mode, although it allows us to establish this impossibility. It remains an optional distinction whereas my own is necessary for all narratives.