Notes on Creativity Revolutions: Key Aspects of Socio-cultural and Literary Postmodernism

By Ian Irvine (Hobson)

Copyright Ian Irvine (Hobson), 2011-2013, all rights reserved. All quotes appearing in this article reproduced under international Fair Usage provisions for the purposes of criticism and education. A version of this article also appeared at http://www.authorsden.com/ianirvine in 2011. Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013. NB: This article is published at Scribd as part of a series of articles on historical Creativity Revolutions and contributes to Ians outline of a contemporary Transpersonal Relational Poetics. Image: Friedrich Nietzsche considered by some to be the Father of Postmodernism (in the Public Domain)

As a term, Postmodernism is complex and probably has two distinct meanings relevant to would be writers and artists: 1) A period in Western social and cultural history probably post-1945 to the present punctuated by significant historical events and socio-cultural trends (we shall list these trends shortly). 2) Various post-WW2 intellectual/cultural movements (philosophical and artistic) having as their epicenter the theories of certain mainly European intellectuals1 but embracing also a large number of innovative writers, poets, etc.2 In extending the first definition above we can list some of the key social and cultural trends unique to the postmodern period.3
1. Disbelief in the progress narrative of the West due to the barbarity of colonialism, two world wars, the development (and use) of nuclear warheads, the horrors of the Nazi death camps, and the belated admittance among leftists that Communism had given birth to the authoritarianism of the Stalinists. 2. The rise of technocratic elites that make ordinary people feel constantly under surveillance (by the state and industry) i.e. administered by impersonal experts/professionals. This state of affairs, some have suggested, has led to a prevalent mood of helplessness, paranoia and passivity/apathy. 3. The rise of hyper-consumerism and Neo-liberal economics such that more and more areas of subjectivity and the inter-relational support networks of societies (especially in the West) are turned into commodities to be traded in supposedly free markets. There is a tendency in the postmodern period to make materialism the solution of choice to internal states of alienation that were formerly viewed as metaphysical or existential problems of being. 4. The advent of a shared global worldview that exists side by side with multiple unique, locally evolved, understandings of the world. This has come about due to improvements in the mechanical means of travel and also due to new communication technologies that make the world seem smaller. The result is a world of many different ontologies (paradigms/ realities), sometimes coexistent, sometimes clashing, that individuals somehow have to come to terms with. This condition gives rise to a literature of the interstitium (or the zone inbetween) i.e. created by writers who deliberately place themselves in the space between monolithic (potentially hostile) paradigms/worldviews.

1 Particularly relevant are of course figures like Roland Barthes, Helene Cixous, Deleuze and Guattarri,
Derrida, Foucault, Jurgen Habermas, Linda Hutcheon, Luce Irigaray, Jameson, Julia Kristeva, Lacan, JeanFrancois Lyotard, Richard Rorty and Patricia Waugh. 2 In terms of postmodern literature the following writers are often listed as key innovators: Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert-Grillet, Nabokov, Robert Coover, John Barth, Italo Calvino, Jorge Borges, Richard Brautigan, William Burroughs, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco and Don Delillo. Many leading Australian literary figures are also described as having written postmodernist texts: e.g.. Janet Turner Hospital, Dorothy Porter, Drusila Modjeska and Peter Carey. 3 The following list simplifies lists of defining characteristics as outlined in books and essays on the topic. For simplicities sake Ill only mention some key overview works on postmodernism: Postmodernism, edited by Patricia Waugh, particularly the extracts from works by Irving Howe, Ihab Hasan and William Spanos. Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, particularly the extracts by Jameson, Habermas and Baudrillard..

5. The advent of the electronic mass media with its unprecedented capacity to beam realities (including prejudices associated with given realities) into every home at breakfast has given birth to a new unease among many artists and thinkers about the capacity of elites to manipulate mass sentiment. As a consequence the sign systems, most obviously the language codes, that sustain ideologies, religions, etc. (i.e. grand narratives to use a term coined by Lyotard) need to be periodically interrogated for signs of authoritarianism and intolerance. The capacity of mere words and images to oppress is studied as never before. 6. The rise of an environmental consciousness due to signs in the post-war period that the lifesustaining capacity of the global ecosystem is under severe strain. 7. Distrust of the scientific and Enlightenment heritages among large numbers of social critics and writers/artistswe may even speak of a sustained assault on the objective truth-telling pretensions of Enlightenment reason. The collapse of Newtonian science at the hands of the physics of firstly Einstein and later Quantum Mechanics has fuelled this trend especially with the realisation that at sub-atomic levels uncertainty prevails i.e. the laws of Newtonian physics do not strictly speaking apply. . 8. A sustained critical attack on the concept of the self (i.e. subjectivity) as constructed by Enlightenment influenced philosophy. Many postmodernists prefer to speak of our plural/multiple and fragmented experience of subjectivity rather than the more individualistic, rational idea of subjectivity bequeathed to us by nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers. Some theorists argue that there is no real self at all and suggest that the self must be understood as socially constructed, others, however, prefer to point to a complex relational (that is: relationships dependent) self, as against the individualistic, separated self theorized by the various post-traditional Grand Narratives of secularism. 9. Some theorists have argued that the postmodern period has seen epidemics of certain pathologies of subjectivity, notably: unhealthy narcissism, depression/chronic ennui, schizophrenic de-realisation, psychopathic and borderline pathologies, and so on. These epidemics are in turn linked to postmodern social and cultural trends. Fragmentation, hyperaddiction and an inability to feel have become emblematic of the postmodern condition. 10. Many postmodernists have split with the seriousness of high modernist intellectual culture lightness, comedy, absurdity, carnival, parody and love of popular culture are apparently in. 11. Questions about the validity of the literary cannon have been asked by various excluded minorities. 12. The advent of a sexual revolution in the West initiated by firstly the Freudian revolution, secondly the development and easy availability of cheap contraception from the 60s on and thirdly the gay rights movement is also a feature of postmodern culture. 13. The post-war development of various sophisticated forms of Feminism, firstly in the West, and later globally. It is also important to note a willingness among many Western educated Feminist thinkers and activists to develop theoretical models that integrate female experiences of oppression with many other forms of oppression and human rights abuses i.e. racism, classism, etc. This model is termed the intersectional model of oppression.

Postmodern Literary Techniques: How to Create an Ontological Scandal

From the perspective of fiction writing technique the convergence of the historical and cultural phenomena listed above gave rise to a variety of new literary techniques that some commentators have seen as a continuance of the modernist experimental agenda. Others, however, speak of a postmodern literary uniquenessMcHale for example suggests that the new techniques address the new questions people were asking post-1945. Whereas Modernist writers and poets aimed to critique bourgeois and elitist paradigms by atomising the literary forms in which those paradigms were expressed (especially classicism, realism, naturalism and romanticism) postmodernist writers tended to want to bring the very possibility of a grand paradigm into doubt. Whereas Modernist writers sought to establish, or uncover, a more real experience of life in the world, underneath, as it were, the sleep imposed by the conformist ideologies of the middle classes in particular, postmodernists tended to abandon, critique or parody any attempt to fix or locate the real in language (or in sign systems generally). The Postmodern writer is thus much more cynical about the possibility of uncovering universal and stable truths tending to see this impulse as a problem in itself. The postmodernist writer also entertains the possibility that there are an infinite number of worlds, truths, realities and selves to experience those worlds, truths and realities. It is useful to state at this juncture that many contemporary writerssome among the best and most innovativehave adopted postmodern writing techniques not merely to bamboozle and frustrate would be readers, but to grapple with some of the profound issues listed above. For many writers, postmodernist techniques help them write about the strangeness of the contemporary world. They make use of such techniques in order to free subjectivity from the unnecessary straitjackets placed on it by what passes for common sense, conformist visions of what is. Conformism, to some postmodernists, begins with the philosophic pseudo-certainties we inherited from the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. To postmodernists such paradigms inevitably maketh monstersand are seen as potentially destructive, conformist and psycho-spiritually oppressive. Some of the more interesting postmodernists are creative thinkers intent on finding new, more humane and nonauthoritarian paradigms by which to live our lives. As poets and fiction writers they also encourage us to ask important questions about what it actually means to write and be creative. On a less esoteric note, some of the writing techniques listed, for example, in Brian McHales books Postmodernist Fiction and Constructing Postmodernism, or, more accessibly, Hazel Smiths recent book The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing, are fun to experiment with! In Postmodernist Fiction McHale outlines some of the key themes and techniques of postmodern writers. Underlying almost all of the themes and techniques he lists is what he describes as the centrality of ontological questions/perspectives.
The dominant obsessions of postmodernist fiction are ontological in nature the primary questions are: Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it? The postmodernist writer may also ask: What is a world? What kinds of worlds are there, how are they constituted and how do they differ? What happens when different kinds of worlds are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated? What is the mode of existence of a text and what is the mode of existence of the world it projects? How is a projected world structured? And so on 4

4 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 1991: p.10.

To McHale the dominant obsessions of modernist fiction were epistemological How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it? Modernist questioning tends to revolve around what it is possible to know as well as the legitimacy of different types of knowledge about the world. Postmodernists, however, ask fundamental questions about the real, i.e. about what actually exists. We can plot the relationship between these uniquely postmodernist cultural concerns and the kinds of techniques developed by postmodernist fiction writers like Pynchon. To begin with we can say that narratives based upon reason, logic, facts/data, etc. are often parodied or disrupted (ruptured) by techniques which foreground desire, playfulness, comedy, farce and the like. Similarly, tropes from popular genres of writing (low culture) often pop up in postmodern texts, often to hilarious or ironic effect. Larger than life historical figures, or even fantasy figures may gate-crash otherwise realist storiessuch as we see happen, for example, in Forest Gump. Sometimes the result is a new or hybrid genre. For example, Thomas Pynchon frequently used bawdy rhymes in his novels and was masterful at incorporating tropes from the populist genres of particular eras into the narrative. Here in Australia the poet Dorothy Porter has written book length poems that mingle lyric poetry with aspects of the crime novel genre. In terms of the content of much postmodern literature various problematic themes appear that are loosely associated with what psychoanalysts label the fragmentation of the subject. Schizophrenia, super-addiction, polymorphous addictive sexuality (sometimes with violent undertones), unhealthy narcissism (self-absorption), de-realisation, paranoia and the trope of the anti-hero psychopath (the terrorist, serial killer, vigilante, cult leader, etc.) become cultural tropes indicative of the new alienation. They signify a shift from depth to surfacethe writer no longer seeks to break down bourgeois consciousness (in an attempt to find a real self), but seeks instead to hold together, even celebrate, a radically fragmented self. Fictive images, ideas, events, etc. may appear to float about in the text, apparently disconnected from each other and from unifying conceptions of time and space. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the surrealisation of consciousness. Some, however, have argued that the appearance of such cultural tropes is actually symptomatic of cultural fragmentation rather than being indicative of an impulse toward liberation. Again Gravitys Rainbow is a seminal text in this respect. McHale also argues that postmodernist writers may construct literary heterotopias or zones (impossible or problematic worlds). Postmodernist heterotopias or zones are disordered places where ordinary spatial and temporal laws may not function properly (without law or geometry). Worlds of incompatible structures are thrown together ignoring realist literary conventions. In the process the reader is made aware of the constructedness of all textsthe movie Dogsville, for example, remove walls and other building props from the films otherwise realist scenes, but the characters continue to act as though the walls etc. still exist. McHale defines a heterotopia as follows:
It is a place where our world mingles with the other world; where hallucinations and fantasies become real; where metaphors become literal; where the fictional worlds of the mass media thrust themselves into the midst of historical reality. The zone, in short, becomes pluralist. 5

Its also a place where A large number of fragmentary possible worlds coexist in an impossible space located nowhere but in the text itself. This creates in the reader a sense of Ontological Scandal because the ordinary person feels uneased when reading about multiple worlds, world-views, realities etc. occupying narrative space (a zone) in mutually 5 McHale, Postmodernist Fiction pg.45.

impossible ways. Other techniques may involve employing a constantly shifting point of view or making use of an unreliable first person narrator. Another feature of PM fiction is that some writers allow the supernatural, the mystical, the miraculous, the fabulous, etc. to figure strongly in their texts without offering realist (i.e. Cartesian/Newtonian) explanations of what is going onpartly in (postcolonial) acknowledgment of the validity of traditional sacred views of the world, and partly as a critique of the mind control exercised by societies that privilege reason, progress and science. In this respect Franz Kafka is perhaps one of the first postmodern novelists. Such trends in post-modern fiction are also central to Magical Realist fiction writing strategies. A general 20th century crisis related to the validity of shared sign systems (languages etc.) also features strongly in postmodern fiction. Many writers reject the linguistic conventions of particular dominant groups. The language experiments begun by modernists like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and any number of surrealist poets and writers, continue, even gather pace, in the postmodern period. Accepted forms and ways of expressing literary ideas are broken down, parodied, ruptured, etc. BBC English may be deliberately subverted by way of incorporating the linguistic and grammatical styles of subaltern minorities and outsiders. In short, the oppressed reject the language structures (therefore thought patterns) of their oppressors. New questions (and liberational possibilities) abound: Is there a uniquely female literary voice? Is there a uniquely gay literary voice? and so on. In terms of post-colonialism, the Australian Aboriginal poet, Lionel Foggerty, attempts to use the language of the colonizer back against itselfin a sense reverse colonizing English (or at least resisting its mind control imperatives) by introducing Aboriginal inflexions and rhythms. Many postmodernist writers also delight in constructing texts in which postEnlightenment scientific, rationalist and bourgeois perspectives on life are not taken as foundational. This impulse is often attached to a critique of historywhich is demoted to the status of: the stories cultures like to tell themselves about what happened in the past. The darker side to the Realist world-view (i.e. what is excluded from the history books) may only become visible through the use of techniques that draw our attention to the constructedness of all kinds of narrative/story. Some novelists have written alternative (subversive) descriptions of major historical events (for example, Pynchons Mason and Dixon) based upon previously suppressed or ignored historical research. This deliberate blurring (critiquing) of the line between reality (i.e. conventional history) and fiction forces readers to ask a central postmodernist question: What world is this? Finally, character is not necessarily stable in much postmodern fiction. Characters are revealed to have multiple selves (even infinite multiple selves)some dissolve completely mid-text (as with Slothrop in Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow). The postmodern writer may also either parody or eschew completely psychological depth (the mainstay of Realist and Modernist fictions) in portraying character. No real self is permitted to be revealed by a character to the reader, instead we may be shown a collection of masks/personasagain foregrounding language and literary technique over the desire to present a reality beyond the text to the reader. The realist characterunderstood in terms of Newtonian temporality and space markersis also deconstructed, as is the idea that he or she is purely fictive. When historical characters (McHale: realemes) and fantasy figures appear in the narrative alongside purely fictional characters we also note a certain destabilization of identitywho are the real people/characters and who are the invented ones? The postmodernist writer may also insert him or herself into the text as a character thus problematizing the self-evident difference between fiction and objective non-fiction. At intervals the PM writer or poet may break the spell of his/her fictive world by telling the reader about the difficulties/joys etc. associated with writing the book or poem. Similarly, a

writer may describe a story development then immediately erase it (sous erasure) thus jolting readers out of the escapist experience of reading the work, and into a willed experience of reading in which the reader becomes a kind of co-creator actively choosing a narrative. There is a non-authoritarian political dimension to this technique: the reader is being weaned off of the tendency to passively imbibe the authors view of reality and is instead being asked to develop a democratic habit of selecting and creating narratives (therefore realities, worlds, versions of self, etc.) that suit his/her particular circumstances. Oppression is undone. Questioning the apparent single meaning of a text, adapting its narrative to ones own purposes, is surely a crucial skill in a world in which the mass media has at its disposal immensely powerful mind control technologies and techniques.

Author Bio
Dr. Ian Irvine is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in two Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of a number of literary journals Scintillae 2012, The Animist ezine (7 editions, 1998-2001) and Painted Words (8 editions 2005-2013). Ian currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia) as

well as the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of morbid ennui. In his recent theoretical work he has attempted to develop an anti-oppressive approach to creative writing based upon the integration of Cultural-Relational theories concerning self in relation with Jungian and Groffian models of the collective or transpersonal unconscious. Web site: http://www.authorsden.com/ianirvine