The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (pdf document) download at fliiby.com

"This page intentionally left blank The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism offers a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism. The Companion examines the different aspects of postmodernist thought and culture that have had a signiﬁcant impact on contemporary cultural production and thinking. Topics discussed by experts in the ﬁeld include postmodernism’s relation to modernity, and its signiﬁcance and relevance to literature, ﬁlm, law, philosophy, architecture, religion, and modern cultural studies. The volume also includes a useful guide to further reading and a chronology. This is an essential aid for students and teachers from a range of disciplines interested in postmodernism in all its incarnations. Accessible and comprehensive, this Companion addresses the many issues surrounding this elusive, enigmatic, and often controversial topic. THE CAMBRIDGE C O M PA N I O N T O POSTMODERNISM EDITED BY STEVEN CONNOR    Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521640527 © Cambridge University Press 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 - - - - - - ---- eBook (Adobe Reader) --- eBook (Adobe Reader) ---- hardback --- hardback ---- paperback --- paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. CONTENTS Notes on contributors Chronology Introduction steven connor 1 Postmodernism and philosophy pau l s h e e h a n 2 Postmodernism and ﬁlm c at h e r i n e c o n s ta b l e 3 Postmodernism and literature steven connor 4 Postmodernism and art: postmodernism now and again s t e p h e n m e lv i l l e 5 Postmodernism and performance p h i l i p au s l a n d e r 6 Postmodernism and space julian murphet 7 Science, technology, and postmodernism u rs u l a k . h e i s e 8 Postmodernism and post-religion p h i l i p pa b e r ry page vii x 1 20 43 62 82 97 116 136 168 v Contents 9 Postmodernism and ethics against the metaphysics of comprehension ro b e rt e ag l e s to n e 10 Law and justice in postmodernity c o s tas d o u z i n as Further reading Index 182 196 224 230 vi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS p h i l i p au s l a n d e r is Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture of the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds the PhD in Theatre from Cornell University. At Georgia Tech, Professor Auslander teaches in the areas of Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and Media Studies. He is a contributing editor to both the US-based TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies and the UK-based Performance Research. He contributes regularly to these and other journals, and his books include Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance; From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism; and Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. He received the 2000 Callaway Prize for the Best Book in Theatre or Drama for Liveness. He recently edited Performance: Critical Concepts, a collection of eighty-nine essays in four volumes. His next book project as an author will be All the Young Dudes: Glam Rock and the Discourse of Authenticity in Popular Music. In addition to his scholarly work on performance, Professor Auslander writes art criticism for ArtForum in New York City and Art Papers in Atlanta. p h i l i p pa b e r ry is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at King’s College, University of Cambridge. She combines interdisciplinary research in English and European Renaissance culture with work on feminist and postmodern theory. She is the author of Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen, and of Shakespeare’s Feminine Endings: Disﬁguring Death in the Tragedies, and co-editor of Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion and Textures of Renaissance Knowledge. She is currently writing a study of Shakespeare’s comedies, to be entitled Phenomenal Shakespeare. s t e v e n c o n n o r is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, London, and Director of the London Consortium Programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies. vii Notes on contributors He is the author of books on Dickens, Joyce, Beckett, and postwar ﬁction, as well as of Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary; Theory and Cultural Value; Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism; and The Book of Skin. Other unpublished works and works in progress are to be found on his website at <www.bbk.ac.uk/eh/skc> c at h e r i n e c o n s ta b l e is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at Shefﬁeld Hallam University, where she specializes in philosophy and ﬁlm theory. She has written articles on postmodernism, philosophy, and ﬁlm and has coedited a special issue of Hypatia (vol. 15, no. 2) on Australian feminist philosophy, which was published in Spring 2000. She is currently completing a book for the British Film Institute that is provisionally entitled Thinking in Images: Feminist Philosophy, Film Theory and Marlene Dietrich and due to be published in 2004. c o s tas d o u z i n as is Professor of Law at Birkbeck College, London, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Athens. Educated in Athens, London, and Strasbourg, he has taught at the Universities of Middlesex, Lancaster, Prague, Thessaloniki, Grifﬁth, Cardozo, Nanjing, and Beijing. He is the managing editor of Law and Critique: The International Journal of Critical Legal Thought and of the Birkbeck Law Press. He specializes in jurisprudence, human rights, and critical thought. His books include (with Ronnie Warrington) Postmodern Jurisprudence: The Law of Text in the Texts of Law; (with Ronnie Warrington) Justice Miscarried: Ethics and Aesthetics in Law; (with Ronnie Warrington) The Logos of Nomos: Interpretation, Ethics and Aesthetics in the Law; The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century; (with Lynda Nead) Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law; and Critical Jurisprudence; and Postmodern Just Wars (forthcoming). His work has been translated into ﬁve languages. ro b e rt e ag l e s to n e works on contemporary and twentieth-century literature, literary theory, and philosophy and teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London. His publications include Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas; Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students; Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial; and articles on contemporary European philosophy, Samuel Beckett, Angela Carter, ethics, science, the Holocaust, archaeology, and historiography. He is a Literary Advisor to the British Council and on the Executive of the Forum for European Philosophy. He is the academic series editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers. u rs u l a k . h e i s e is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of Chronoschisms: Time, viii Notes on contributors Narrative and Postmodernism, as well as many essays on literature, science, and postmodernism. She is currently working on a book project entitled Ecology, Technology, and the Posthuman: Postmodern Literature and the Challenge of the Environment. s t e p h e n m e lv i l l e is Professor of the History of Art at Ohio State University and was Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex during 2002–3. He is the author of Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism and Seams: Art as a Philosophical Context; co-author, with Philip Armstrong and Laura Lisbon, of As Painting: Division and Displacement; and co-editor, with Bill Readings, of Vision and Textuality. He has written widely on contemporary art and theory. j u l i a n m u r p h e t has taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and California at Berkeley, and presently is a lecturer in the Department of English, University of Sydney. He has published widely in the ﬁeld of postmodernism, most substantially in his book Literature and Race in Los Angeles. He is also the author of Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho”: A Reader’s Guide. Currently he is preparing a book on the impact of cinema on literary production in America. pau l s h e e h a n is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney. He has published in the areas of narrative poetics and the philosophy of literature, including articles on Dickens and Beckett. He is also the author of Modernism, Narrative and Humanism and the editor of Becoming Human: New Perspectives on the Inhuman Condition. ix CHRONOLOGY 1947 1950 1954 1954–62 1956 1957 1960 India gains independence Pop art Jasper Johns, Flag Algerian War of Independence UK intervenes in Suez Canal, withdraws after US pressure Launch of Sputnik Earth satellite by USSR Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Can Founding of Tel Quel journal 1961 Space War, the ﬁrst computer game, begins to circulate 1964 Terry Riley, In C, foundational work of minimalist music 1963 Martin Luther King gives “I Have a Dream” speech President Kennedy assassinated in Dallas 1965 Steve Reich, Come Out Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 1966 National Organization for Women founded in USA Jacques Derrida gives “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” at Johns Hopkins University 1967 Detroit race riots Six-Day (Arab–Israeli) War The Beatles, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Decriminalization of homosexuality between male adults in UK Flash Art journal founded 1968 Nationwide riots and protests in France USSR invades Czechoslovakia 1968–72 Student protests across US 1969 Neil Armstrong takes ﬁrst steps on the Moon Gay Liberation Front established in New York 1970 boundary 2: a journal of postmodern culture founded Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch 1971 Ihab Hassan, POSTmodernISM: A Paracritical Bibliography x Chronology 1972 1973 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1979 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1984 1985 1986 1988 1989 1990 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, Learning From La Vegas Demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, failed modernist housing project in St Louis Establishment of ARPANET (Advanced Research and Projects Network), forerunner of the internet, linking together universities of Stanford, UCSB, UCLA, and Utah Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow President Nixon resigns over Watergate scandal after break-in at Democratic Party headquarters Appearance of ﬁrst personal computer Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach October begins publication Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture Punk rock First cellular phone released in Tokyo Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne ¸ Michael Graves, Portland Building, Portland, Oregon Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children Gilles Deleuze and F´ lix Guattari, Milles plateaux e Richard Serra, Tilted Arc New York Times reports on appearance of AIDS Ridley Scott, Blade Runner Jean Baudrillard, Simulations English translation of Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition William Gibson, Neuromancer Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Michel Foucault dies Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” Don DeLillo, White Noise David Lynch, Blue Velvet Live Aid, world’s ﬁrst global concert, held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia Space shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after take-off, killing all seven crew members Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective broadcast Tiananmen Square protest and massacre in Beijing. Fall of Berlin Wall Tim Berners-Lee develops concept of World Wide Web David Lynch’s Twin Peaks begins broadcasting Postmodern Culture, an online journal, founded xi Chronology 1990–1 Iraq invades Kuwait: ﬁrst Gulf War 1991 Michael Joyce, Afternoon: A Story Los Angeles riots sparked by beating of Rodney King 1994 South Africa rejoins Commonwealth following end of apartheid 1995 Gilles Deleuze commits suicide 1996 Alan Sokal publishes his hoax essay “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermenutics of Quantum Theory” in Social Text 1997 Dolly the sheep, the ﬁrst successful cloning 1998 Jean-Francois Lyotard dies ¸ 1999 Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin opens 2001 Terrorist attack destroys World Trade Center in New York xii STEVEN CONNOR Introduction “Finished, it’s ﬁnished, nearly ﬁnished, it must be nearly ﬁnished,” Clov promises himself at the beginning of Beckett’s Endgame.1 Surely, the ﬁrst thing to be said about postmodernism, at this hour, after three decades of furious business and ringing tills, is that it must be nearly at an end. But in chess, from which Beckett’s play takes its title, the endgame is not the end of the game, but the game of ending that forms part of it and may be looked towards from the beginning. Playing the game may become identical with playing the game out. There are strategies for managing the end of the game, including ways of deferring that ending, which come not after the game but in the thick of it. One is compelled to begin almost any synoptic account of postmodernism with such sunset thoughts, even as, in the very midst of one’s good riddance, one senses that the sweet sorrow of taking leave of postmodernism may be prolonged for some time yet. For postmodernism has indeed shown an extraordinary capacity to renew itself in the conﬂagration of its demise. One might almost say that the derivative character of postmodernism, the name of which indicates that it comes after something else – modernism, modernity, or the modern – guarantees it an extended tenure that the naming of itself as an ex nihilo beginning might not. You can credibly inaugurate a new beginning only for a short so long, whereas you can carry on succeeding upon something almost indeﬁnitely, catching continuing success from your predecessor’s surcease. Like Shelley’s famous fading coal of inspiration, the weakening of postmodernism itself can be turned into the same kind of regenerative resource as the weakening of modernism itself. Might postmodernism have solved the problem of eternal life? We should remember from Swift’s Struldbrugs that eternal life is a monstrosity without the promise of eternal youth. I will here distinguish four different stages in the development of postmodernism: accumulation; synthesis; autonomy; and dissipation. In the ﬁrst stage, which extends through the 1970s and the early part of the 1980s, the hypothesis of postmodernism was under development on a number of 1 steven connor different fronts. Daniel Bell and Jean Baudrillard were offering new accounts of consumer society, Jean-Francois Lyotard was formulating his views ¸ about the waning of metanarratives, Charles Jencks was issuing his powerful manifestos on behalf of architectural postmodernism, and Ihab Hassan was characterizing a new sensibility in postwar writing, all of them, apart from Baudrillard, more or less programmatically employing the rubric “postmodernism.” I will not consume the limited space I have at my disposal here in trying to characterize their ideas and arguments in detail, especially since so many serviceable introductions to their work already exist.2 At this stage, it was a genuine puzzle for anyone trying to get a secure ﬁx on the term “postmodern” to make the different sorts of argument applied to different kinds of object line up. Perhaps the principal problem was how to synchronize the arguments of those who claimed that the societies of the advanced West had undergone fundamental changes in their organization, and who therefore seemed to be characterizing a shift from modernity to postmodernity, with the arguments of those who thought that they discerned a shift in the arts and culture of these societies from a distinctively modernist phase to a distinctively – or indistinctly – postmodernist phase. From the middle of the 1980s onwards, these separate accounts began to be clustered together – most notably in the superb synopsis and synthesis provided in Fredric Jameson’s landmark essay “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.”3 Gradually, what came to seem important was not so much the aptness of the explanations of particular varieties of postmodernism as the increasingly powerful rhymes that different accounts of the postmodern formed with each other. Indeed, it seemed to be a feature of the postmodern itself that parallelism became more important and interesting than causation. This was also the period of the most vigorous syncretism in thinking of the postmodern. Jameson’s essay opened the way for a number of synthesizing guides and introductions, which were followed in the early 1990s by a wave of anthologies of postmodern writing.4 The effect of this was that, by the beginning of the 1990s, the concept of the “postmodern” was ceasing to be used principally in the analysis of particular objects or cultural areas and had become a general horizon or hypothesis. I was an amateur astronomer as a boy and I remember being told that the way to make out the elusive color of a faint star was not to look directly at it, but to look just to its side, since this allowed the image to fall on a part of the retina that is more sensitive to color. I don’t know if this is true of star-observation (it certainly never worked for me), but it seems to have begun to be true for spotters of the postmodern during this second period, when it seemed that, if one wanted to pin down the postmodernist features of some unlikely object of analysis – war, say, or prostitution, or circus – the thing to do was to look 2 Introduction directly not at your target but at what lay in its periphery. Postmodernism was the practice of critical distraction (literally being “drawn aside”). Postmodernism arose from the amalgamation of these many deﬂections or diagonal gazes. It evoked a horizontal lattice-work of connections between different postmodernisms, rather than a discontinuous series of “vertical” diagnoses of speciﬁc postmodernisms. As kinship patterns among postmodernists became more important than patterns of descent, “analogical” postmodernism took the place of “genealogical” postmodernisms.5 But synthesis brought its own problems. Postmodernist theory responded to the sense that important changes had taken place in politics, economics, and social life, changes that could broadly be characterized by the two words delegitimation and dedifferentiation. Authority and legitimacy were no longer so powerfully concentrated in the centers they had previously occupied; and the differentiations – for example, those between what had been called “centers” and “margins,” but also between classes, regions, and cultural levels (high culture and low culture) – were being eroded or complicated. Centrist or absoluti..."

You need to upgrade your Flash Player , or try to enable javascript in order see this document properly.