A Time for Reconstruction: Postmodernism in/of the Third Millennium Adriana-Cecilia Neagu

Behind the question of the year 2000, the more general problem is that of the end, of what is beyond the end or, on the contrary, of the restrospective movement caused by the proximity of the end. Are we at the end of history, beyond history, or still in an endless history? (Baudrillard 1998)

Drawing upon the significant insights into change and cultural change contributed by comparative cultural studies over the past three decades or so, this paper proposes a corollary discussion of current directions in postmodern practice and thought from the vantage point of the phenomenons contending heterodoxies and inner contradictions. Making use of a by now already classical deconstructive methodology, it aims at rereading Postmodernism against what I distinguish as one of its most evident paradoxes: the anxieties that on the one hand it has echoed and, on the other, projected onto the discipline of the humanities. As with all demonstrative deconstructive gazes, the proposed analysis is purposely angled, hunting for those points of rupture that inhere in the postmodernist poetics, and that High Postmodernism, as the expression of Postmodernisms coming of age is trying or failing to grapple with. Building on the laws of cyclicity embedded in the theory of the dominant as well as on a set of propositions pertaining to the institutional turn toward postmodernism, this enquiry states the case for postmodernisms foundering as a discursive mode, and its consummation as a cultural phase. As well as uncovering Postmodernisms complicity with the humanist crises that it deplores, the examination expects to articulate some of the ways in which the will to performativity that postmodern discourses never tire of celebrating does not necessarily equal performativity. Among the arguments supporting the vision of a declining postmodernist discourse, the need for reintegration and the regaining of a lost centrality play a crucial part. Misconstrued as an appanage of its discursive formation, Postmodernisms self-interest is in my view debilitating and inevitably conducive to structures of exclusion, the kind the phenomenon started out by exposing. A brief consideration of postmodernism and ethics hopes to reveal how Postmodernisms deferral of positioning --like the freeplay of its postructuralistically inherited infinite textuality-- devolves the sense of authority and responsibility upon individuals and institutions, speaking to whomever it may concern, and thus marching to the sound of different drummers. This evasion of Postmodernism in dissent together with the sectarian fragmentariness that mars the horizon of contemporary culture, I would like to explore in relation to Postmodernisms millennial turn, thus trying out a tentative answer to the question whither Postmodernism? What Postmodernism was is a question that has already been addressed, negociated with and responded to from a variety of angles and in the meta- and metametalanguages of almost every sphere of thought, culture and learning. And while analysts have finally agreed to disagree on its origins and canons, they seem to be at a loss for both open accord and open disaccord when it comes to its implications and
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future directions. This comes as no surprise since passing judgement on the contemporary event-scene1 is an unsafe bet enough given the flows and meanders of the volatile present; forecasting the near future is already an intellectual gambling that most knowledge workers of today would regard as ludicrous. Beyond the inner contradictions that Postmodernism shares with all period concepts, and the hazards of exercising analytical foresight in relation to what it is pre- there are postmodern-specific difficulties inherent in the phenomenons particularly awkward position towards its period status. Deriving from the latter is that, most ironically, the unrelenting wars that Postmodernism has waged against fundamentalism in all registers of discourse have gradually become the very battles that many of those looking beyond its horizon are now engaged in. In other words, the categorial absolutes that postmodernists, as routinised deconstructors, have gone to such lengths to unmask, come back to haunt them in the paradoxical guise of their own propositions being at times turned into postulates. Thus taken for granted, Postmodernisms anti-universalistic anti-imperialistic tenors underwent a process of museumification, in which, on the one hand, the phenomenon gained unquestionable institutional dominance, on the other, its reflexive act failed to keep pace with its own development as the Equivocal Autobiography of an Age (Hassan 2000: 12). Unawaringly --a term one would have hardly thought fitting with reference to it-through the absolute relativisation of epistemologic, ethical and aesthetic norms that it campaigned for, Postmodernism has elicited forms of dogmatism calling into question the very performative status of its enquiry. This as in the closed self-referential circuit that postmodern investigation operates, the object of enquiry is bound to be feedbacked by the semiotic hence the circularity of the same difference. More specifically, the postmodern enquiring subject being par excellence structured as language, the performativity of postmodern investigation is obscured by its narcissistic quests, of which the compelling iteration of linguistic immanence. From this vantage point, Postmodernism may well be in need of a process of re-postmodernisation just as deconstruction shows signs of deconstructing itself, and therefore, stepping into its own reconstruction. By re-postmodernisation we mean a re-thinking of itself in terms of discursiveness, performativity and constructedness, i.e. of those chief attributes more or less unanimously considered to typify the postmodern project. The infelicitous condition of postmodern theory and practice, of both embodying and representing the desert of reality, the always already of the present moment, is what makes for Postmodernisms entry into its own obsolescence:
This act of self-reflection is unstable, as all autobiographies must be which try to understand a life in the very process of living, it must be unstable --and this is the essence of the second difficulty I mentioned here. Put still another way: postmodernism has changed, zig-zagged, in the very process of revealing itself, as we have changed in the process of living our lives. (Hassan 2000: 12-13)

The ultra-newness that the patriarchs of High Postmodernism have now come to be associated with is not without a history, and in the simultaneous process of manifesting
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A syntagm describing the field of theorisation of CTheory, one of the highest currency journals of theory, technology and culture. 2

and thinking itself, cultural Postmodernism has not just ceased to keep pace with its own development, thus losing its discursive integrity, but it succumbed more and more to the dictates of postmodernity. The predicaments of culture that Postmodernism started out by deploring have so engulfed the reflective effort that discussion seems no longer to abstract itself from the state of affairs that it is expected to illuminate. Over at least four decades of existence in the double bind situation of subject and object of enquiry, Postmodernism has become more in culture than of culture, participating in the anxieties it purported to dispel. And when the age and culture are those of inflation (Newman 1985: 4), the struggle for disaffiliation breeds an even riskier interdependence. Signals of a post-postmodern turn are also perceptible from the direction of Postmodernisms positioning towards old forms. The once radically deconstructive stance --so apparent in the phenomenons potential for undefinining and heavy-weight derisive arsenal-- seems now to have made way to either complacency or a will to restoration; and hence the nostalgia is one for the past, a reverse of Jamesons finding. In popular culture, the latter tendency is particularly distinct in the New American Film, a style said to have emerged with productions such as The Matrix, Being John Malkovitch, American Psycho, American Beauty and Fight Club, which read more like representations of the longing for a lost centrality, of an object of resistance rather than acts of resistance in themselves. As a contributor to CTheory: Theory, Technology and Culture notes, beneath the appearance of castigating the Establishment lies an almost sentimental projection of its loss:
.Fight Club is actually a nostalgia film. And so are American Beauty, American Psycho, and Being John Malkovitch. They look postmodern, sound postmodern. But they dont bark postmodern, because theyve got nothing to bark at. All worked up with nowhere to go except deep inside the Brain, these movies direct their furies at nothing less than the fact of their very own obsolescence in a culture where nothing really means anything, after all.The movies [Fight Clubs] rebellion doesnt seek so much to tear down the System, but rather to lash out at its absence, te re-create the Lost Father, to make Law in the void, to reassert order over Randomness; in short, to create rules. (Rombes: C Theory, online article)

To a growing number of theorists, the self-formative processes underlying Postmodernisms statements, have already been displaced by sound and affirmative arguments stemming from New Historicism and Cultural Studies. To others, more concerned with e-theory and digital ideology, the dromological2 and the political conditions of the twenty first century, Postmodernism has come to be more accurately described as hypermodernism,3 i.e. a phenomenon not entirely divergent from modernism and modernity, capitalising on critiques of militarism and technoscience as the main sources of the contemporary morass. To radical sociologists such as Baudrillard, Postmodernism is heading toward an obliterating virtualisation. Perhaps the
a concept invented by French cultural theorist Paul Virilio, one of the most acclaimed analysts of the art of technology, a poetician of techno-science and author of a series of topical studies on speed and acceleration in the contemporary world. 3 for a discussion of American media culture and the cultural logic of contemporary infowars, see the works of Paul Virilio, and Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. 3
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final masterstroke of irony is the authoritarian tone in which High Postmodernism has sounded the demise of authority in the non-hegemonic, textually constructed (or shall we say self-destructive) world. From its current canonical position, Postmodernism is beginning to look mainstream and the tyranny of rhetoricity and textuality, more High Culture than ever. The question arises then, did the birth of plurality indeed come at the expense of the death of hegemony? Or is it that in the so-called metamimetic productivity of writing itself such notions are totally immaterial, and that there is no deliverance from what appears to feel like cultural anarchy? Whatever the ebbs and flows, the cycles and reclycles of monopolistic, consumerist and multinational capitalism, to this interpreter of postmodern culture, the Gulf War did take place, and, whatever the simulation effect, the Reality of it cannot be undone. In the shadow of what will be remembered as that fateful September 11, it may well be that gender, class and race politics and the technologies of meaning, the free play of language and the fictiveness of fiction will take a back seat, and the really pressing issues commanding attention will become the doom and the gloom of transnational, transgendered and pan-sexual trauma. Real-time politics, its centrism and complicities, biases and compromises will certainly overtake a long-standing practice of discursive political economy. A heightened perception of the ultimate need for some verities to hang on to, might even dethrone or at least refine the precepts of the non-existence of privileged speakers and positions from which to speak. Ethicswise, the meaning of alterity needs to be rediscovered positively, too many divorcing negative perspectives marring the enquiries into race, ideology and ethnicity these days. In the fictional arena, the effervescent experimental agenda that Barth, McEwan, Pynchon, Barnes,Vonnegut, M. Amis, Barthelme, Coover and other postmodern pioneers saw as the major priority in the waste land of the post-modernist scene, soon turned out to be one of negative creativity, exalting linguistic dysfunctionality and generating a superabundance of self-mimeticism. And, as the comparative analyses elaborated in Sublimating the Post-Modern Discourse illustrate, much of what traditional postmodernist literature represents as perplexing and disabling, is already being unrepresented in an enabling, reified mode. In their dealings with language scepticism and logocentricity --two of the axioms clouding the postmodern investigation-- a few liberated post-postmoderns on both sides of the Atlantic, set the tone for resuscitating action, moving on as we write into a discourse of recovery and resistance. Furthermore, some of the by now high priests of literary postmodernism listed above could not but have learnt the lesson that nothing will come of nothing and, seem to be now willing to speak again. Works Cited: Hassan, Ihab. What Was Postmodernism and What Will It Become? in Twentieth-Century American Literature after Midcentury, International
Conference Proceedings (Kyiv, 25-27 May, 1999). Kyiv: Publishing Dovira, 2000.

Newman, Charles. The Postmodern Aura: the Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985. Rombes, Nick. Restoration, American Style in C Theory: Theory, Technology and Culture vol. 23, no. 1-2, online version http//: www.ctheory.com.
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