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youre not looking for that larger historical sequence or history, then
I think the poetics still stands. So thats an answer at that level of
the issue. At the level of the fate of postmodernism altogether, here
I have to plead agnosticism. Im actually not a futurologist -- Im not
in the business of predicting the future, Im in the business of literary
history, which is to observe what has happened, and to think to
some degree historically, in the literary-historical sense, about the
present moment. But I think I have too good a sense about how
many variables you would have to be thinking about, not to mention
how many unexpected irruptions from elsewhere you would have to
be taking into account, to talk about the future, so I dont pretend to
have anything useful to say about where were going. Im
sympathetic to the idea, as I suggested in my Edinburgh lecture of 2
days ago, What Was Postmodernism? Or, The Last of the Angels,
that you heard the other day, that postmodernism may be
exhausting itself, that it may be reaching a kind of limit, but beyond
that, I dont have anything more sensible to say than anyone else
would. Nobody should treat as reliable anything that I or anyone
else for that matter-- might say about what is coming next,
especially in the light of the ongoing transformation of the whole
media ecology. It is distinctly possible that talking about
postmodernist literature will be rendered obsolete. Im not going to
endorse that view either actually, but it is a possibility. I think its
more likely that what were seeing in the present will continue, which
is to say, verbal literatures place in the whole media ecology is
going to change as the new media and forms of expression in new
media take up different niches in the overall system. Literature will
shift sideways, parts of it will be superseded by new media, parts of
it will develop new functions, and new niches. So I dont think I have
to take the apocalyptic view that this may be the last literature
generation or something like that, but I do think its a good guess
that literatures place will be quite different in the future mediascape
than it had been and that it is now. And that being the case, really,
one is in no good position to speculate about what the next thing is
likely to be.
BM: I can see that view of the matter and its partly a satisfying
view. Yet, I never bought into the idea, which is a sort of another
apocalyptic idea, that postmodernism was a radical break, a leap
into the unknown, that there was no continuity and no way back
from it to where we had been before. Im more of the view that
postmodernist literary expression, and maybe postmodernism in
general, behaves like earlier cultural periods and phenomena
behaved, which is to say that precisely the mechanism you were
talking about is working, that a canonical version of it will be or is
being or has been crystallised now, which has its own life cycle, and
that the dynamics of change from the inside and change from the
outside are going on all along. I have no problem thinking about it in
those terms, so I expect to see that being played out. On the other
hand, Im also attracted to Lyotards view of a sort of perpetual
postmodernism, which is not I think at all incompatible with the other
view. Lyotard, as you know, reserves the name postmodernism for
what cannot be accommodated by the canonical system its
BM: I think a nuanced answer would be that, in the first place, the
general media embrace of postmodernism comes very late in the
day. Many of the things we recognise now as being postmodernist
preceded the coinage of the word altogether, and date from the
50s-60s. Even after the coinage of the word in the 1970s it had
been coined earlier, but its de facto coinage, its availability, dates
from the seventies -- even in the course of the 70s there is not
much media interest in postmodernism. If you go back and search
mass media, the term hasnt been taken up yet. So, even though
the term is already available in certain areas, to academics and
architecture critics, it still circulates in fairly limited circles, and really
only gets taken up as a media buzzword in the 80s sometime and
into the 90s. So its certainly the case that it was a media
buzzword and a fashion statement, but all that comes rather late in
the cycle, really after the most interesting uses of the term had
occurred in the academy and art practice. In other words, of course
there was exaggeration, of course there was hype and of course
there was a sort of media false consciousness about the
postmodern, but I dont think it interfered with the actual emergence
of the term, or the actual creation of what we see as its most
distinctive works, or the works likely to have the longest shelf life,
literary-historically speaking, or art-historically speaking. I think
those all predate the use of the term in mass media.
AN: Outlooks too are subject to the cycle of ideas hence bound to
change. In rethinking your findings in Constructing Postmodernism
and the developments and refinements to the poetics of
postmodernist forms that the book contributes, is there anything that
you would do differently in methodological terms? And what
prompted the work on The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole?
AN: By definition
BM: Its not so much that its unproductive, its just that when you do
that, the results are much more various. You get a much wider
variety of findings. So, I think thats a net gain actually. One comes
away from this saying, well, after all, theres not a single unifying
postmodernism across cultural practices. Of course, theres really
no reason to imagine that there wouldve been. Despite Fredric
Jamesons very persuasive attempts to make all postmodernism
responsive to a single cultural logic, its hard to do, and that
probably has to do with the interference between, indeed the
intersection between, so to speak, exterior history and the interior
histories of each of these disciplines or practices, which are being
driven by their own internal dynamics, at the same time that theyre
all subject and responding to the cultural logic of late capitalism.
And out of that come these different chronologies, these different
sequences, and different strands of development. As I try to show in
the Introduction to The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole, if you
looked at the postmodernisms of different disciplines, you would
immediately see that some have strong postmodernisms, in the
sense that its almost inconceivable to talk about the history of that
field without the use of the term, and some have weak
postmodernisms, in the sense that plenty of people get along just
fine without talking in those terms. And theres some correlation
between the strength of their postmodernism and the strength of
their modernism, so there is such a thing as modern dance in a very
sharply defined way, and consequently postmodern dance is a
relatively clear profile. Equally, modern architecture and postmodern
BM: Sure and of course it has been. That comes with the territory,
its nothing to be worried about. And that happens despite all the
disclaimers that I did or might write -- it doesnt make any difference,
people will still believe what they please. You cant worry about it,
but when you get the chance, you complicate it for them, saying,
yes, but or no, it cant be as straightforward as that, can it, and
you just keep reiterating, that this is a heuristic device, this is a
construction, its not something Ive found out in the world, but Ive
made it in order to accommodate the things that I found out there in
the world. On the one hand, its very flattering and its very affirming,
because it means that people have found it handy, but it also means
that I have to be philosophical about the applications of it that look
misguided, or, as you say, reductive. I cant have those satisfactions
without also having the dissatisfactions.
AN: 9-11 and the fateful validations of the millennial anxieties that it
brought, became a periodical term, indeed an almost civilisational
marker. Can we see its reverberations on the scene of the
contemporary as a sudden relapse into an epistemological order, in
identity terms and otherwise? A catch term with Postmodernism
repeated like a mantra by its theorists was its politics of plurality and
multiculturalism. Did 9-11 mark the foundering of the
multiculturalism project?
BM: There are two things here. First, Ive always been suspicious
of the conflation of postmodernism and postcolonialism. In fact, Im
suspicious of the conflation of all the posts. I dont think
poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism are all the
same posts -- quite the reverse, Im fairly confident that theyre
each responding to different historical sequences, that they are the
fruits of different historical logics. Postcolonialism is coming out of
its own logic, and even its acknowledgement of, let alone its identity
with, postmodernism, is fairly weak; it doesnt actually need
postmodernism. There would have been a poscolonialism even if
there never were a postmodernism, Im fairly confident of that. The
conflation of postmodernism and poststructuralism I think is also a
mistake -- its a misunderstanding of intellectual history. The
assumption that the postmodernists were illustrating postructuralist
theory, I think, is very easily disproved just by virtue of the dates.
Poststructuralism in North America, where arguably the first
postmodernisms became self-aware, became aware of themselves
as such, wasnt available at the time when the first postmodernisms
were being put in place. North Americans werent reading Foucault
and Derrida in the original, and translations werent available yet.
The most that one can say, therefore, is that they share some
common ancestors, which is probably demonstrably true. So
postructuralism and postmodernism are more like cousins than
parent and child. But thats an aside. As for the 9-11 events,
Randall Stevenson and I, working on our coda to our edited volume
on the Twentieth-Century Literatures in English, have been trying to
work out our position about the end point of the twentieth century.
Were now thinking about a double end point, instructively double:
there is the endpoint that in prospect we imagined would be the
terminus, which is to say, New Years Day of the year 2000, a day
that had been anticipated, arguably, in all kinds of ways,
eschatological as well as utopian. If you remember, there was
anxiety about the possibility that the entire technological system
was going to break down that day because of software bugs, and
then when it didnt happen, there was this sort of anti-climactic
sense, almost a disappointment, certainly outright disappointment
on some peoples part because they thought that all this was going
to be a great opportunity, that all would be swept away and wed
start all over again. After the fact there was a certain amount of
resentment, of cynicism, suspicion that it was all hyped, it was all
marketing device, and conversely, a certain ambiguity; the software
engineers version of the story at least, is that in fact, they fixed it in
time, that in fact there was going to be a disaster, but that they
managed to patch up the software in a big rush in the few years
before the New Years Day 2000, and consequently they staved off
the system crash. We may never know how much truth there was
AN: As though the poem was inscribed with readings of the event?
AN: Or at any rate, it looks that way now. Its exactly the dynamics
of Borges essay on Kafkas precursors. Without Kafka, the
precursors are not related to each other, but as soon as theres
Kafka, they are. Without that shock of 9-11, there is no recognisable
history that leads up to 9-11, and now there is, and hence it is
impossible not to see it in a certain way.
AN: Do you then think that the fateful day, has inevitably triggered
a sui generis radically different understanding of the
postmodernisms relation with history, perhaps a rehabilitation of its
ethics even?
BM: I couldnt say that. For one thing, were too near to the event,
and this is also part of my reluctance to be a futurologist -- I dont
know how thats going to turn out. As I was indicating in my lecture
at the University of Edinburgh, the other day, I do think there is a
waning of some postmodernist features around 9-11, or maybe its
even more correct to say that theres a notable silence around 9-11,
BM: Yes, and on the whole, I think its a bad sign because it looks
like it is in response to 9-11 and the threat of the clash of
civilisations, and that whats being installed in its place is a new
kind of dualism; at least in some quarters thats sort of the desired
outcome of all this, that people are now going to be sobered up by
this shock of reality and will renounce the luxury of indulging in
pluralism, and that they will now confront the reality principle of
opposition and polarity. But theres such a tone of relief in the
quarters where youre hearing this from that its very suspicious.
After all, theyve been waiting for this all along, theyve been trying
to undo the plurality of the postmodern from the beginning; in North
America, and I think also in Europe, plurality is often coded in the
terms of the 60s and the undoing of the 60s. The 60s really is only
a figure of speech, its only a synecdoche really, but the cultural
warfare has been conducted in these terms. Its the 60s and a kind
of policing of the 60s thats at stake, and a call to order after the
excesses of the 60s, which is then recapitulated as a call to order
after the excesses of the 80s, again and again a call to order, which
in effect is simply the recoil from pluralism and the nostalgia for the
rather stable organisation of the Cold War years. Its really a
nostalgia for the clear-cut polarities and divisions of the Cold War,
and now of course you have to reorganise in order to have a
different set of poles, and one can claim the New Europe as your
allies against this other threat, but the structure is the same -- the
names have been changed but the structure is the same. So I think
theres more than a trace of that going on. I dont welcome it, and I
hope its resisted. For all the kind of centrifugal aspects of those
episodes of pluralism, I think thats preferable and less dangerous in
the long run. Ive lately been teaching in a course on science fiction
a novel by Samuel Delany called Trouble on Triton, which is from
the midst of the 70s, a book written in 1976, reflecting a sort of
utopian projection of that pluralisation, a world in which all kinds of
identities, sexual and otherwise, plural identities and consecutive
identities are made available by technological means, and life is
hard because you always have to be making these choices, always
continuously renegotiating the parameters of identity, and my
students, looking at the text, found it actually a dystopia. It was a
very unsettling project to them. They certainly were able to see that
BM: Of course it can be a shallow plurality, but why not, why not
have a shallow plurality rather than none? And its not just a
shallow plurality, one that can be easily recuperated by consumer
culture, that comes down to the choice between Classic Coke and
Diet, which amounts to nothing. But just because thats one version
of it doesnt mean that one wants to ban plurality altogether, and I
think there are deeper possibilities and potentialities. I could tolerate
the shallow pluralism of the marketplace if I felt confident that the
other plurality was also available and secure somehow. The fear is
well be left only with the plurality of the marketplace and in other
respects well be locked back into the Cold War, well be back in
what my friend Alan Nadel calls the culture of containment.
BM: Yes, but not unthinkable. The first time around the culture of
containment was about consumer choice and containment of every
other choice, and theres no reason to think that it couldnt be
revived.
pretty much disappeared from sight, and the reasons for it are quite
extrinsic to his reputation in the States, or to the progress, the cycle
of his career in the States, and has everything to do with the
German reception of a certain kind of Holocaust literature. While it
would be incorrect and naive to say the Germans have
misunderstood Raymond Federman, its true in a certain sense
that Germans have a different appreciation of his work compared to
the Americans, but this is an entirely productive misprision, and
keeps happening all the time.
AN: Which brings us back to the larger cycle and the old equation:
literature-reality, and the postmodernist adventure in it. What are to
you the implications of the waning of postmodernism upon the
adventure of mimesis? Are we contemplating a return to realism in
mutated forms, a postmodern realism?
BM: This is the sort of question that I could evade rather than
answer by saying, if you understand realism in the way in which
Jacobson talks about it, which is to say as a historical dynamic,
where what is regarded as realistic in one generation is
subsequently regarded as purely conventionalised, stylised in the
next, and the violation of those conventions then becomes a new
realism if that is the dynamics of realism, which I think is arguably
of any kind, they look strange, and they look strange in order to
make it strange, make their experience strange.