POMO rants

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

coupla quik komments re: dgg's nice pots:


>Postmodern is one of those terms no one ever really manages to define.
Yes, like art, truth, literature, life, death etc.  None of our Big Concepts is definable.


>Lyotard, the French apologist for postmodernism says "postmodern" has
>different meanings in literature than in other artistic venues.  In art and
>architecture, it seems to mean a sort of eclecticism that both mocks and
>incorporates structuralism and modernism

Yes, the term *postmodern* I think came from an architect named Charles Jencks in the
 mid-60s.  Architectual postmodernism is typified by the eclecticism you mention.  A big 
(though small) book on this new wave of american arch. is Robert Venturi's 1970 or 71 
COMPLEXITY AND CONTADICTION IN CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE.  
Celebration of Vegas strip, 50s California restaurants shaped like the things they sell--hot 
dogs, ice cream cones, etc.)--that cheeky mixing of *high* and *low* you describe in the 
Grand Hotel.



>For my mind, the best definitions of postmodern are the non-definitions.
>F'rinstance, Tony Hilfer (_American Fiction Since 1940_; New York: Longman,
>1992) defines the predecessors of postmodernism--modernism, naturalism, and
>black humor--but doesn't exactly define "postmodern" except as a response.
>F'rinstance, Joyce and Faulkner--as moderns--give us a worldview that denies
>any reality but that of the author.   Postmodernism gives us
>works--Nabokov's _Lolita_, Barth's _Giles Goat Boy_, TRP's _GR_--that leave
>us questioning even the artists' versions.

Can we sweepingly say:
Romantics say Art imitates Life
Modernists say Life imitates Art
Pomos say Life imitates art imitating life imitating art . . . 


>Where a lot of these academical types fall short is in not noting--as
>Umberto Eco says--that the pomo authors always do this with a wink and a nudge.

At least the good ones do.


>Goofy side bar:  "Pomo," incidentally, is considered an insult to some
>postmodern scholars--rather like calling science fiction sci-fi.  Yeahright.
>That's like saying you shouldn't laugh at Groucho if you admire the wit
>informing his humor.

I wouldn't join any club that would admit me, or. I've a good mind to join a club and hit 
you over the head with it.



>In other words, pomo allows Batman and Three Stooges references into Haute
>Litterature.

And sadly, as soon as we let them in, they start acting snooty just like the old aristocrats 
they were s'posed to supplant.  Whither the revolution? Sigh.


>Okay, now as to those other foax:  Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Barthes.  They
>ain't pomo.  Hell, they ain't even funny.  They're post-structuralists [. . . ]
> I mean, okay, we get it:  any argument can be
>turned against itself to some degree.  Good point, now can we talk about
>something else?

Boy, you're lucky you asked to talk about something else.  I was just gonna turn your 
argument against itself.  Actually the idea is not to turn a person's argument against itself,
 but to simply show how the argument already does that quite nicely on its own.  But the 
semantic difference you mention is, I think, an unnecessary confusion.  Post structuralism
 is undeniably postmodern, though perhaps not the other way 'round.



>Of course, metafiction existed long before pomo

IMO, no great work of literature, or any art, I mean really great, fails to include a 
self-referential dimension.  It is to my eye one of the definitions of great art that it affect 
our idea of its own existence, what it means to be art.

john (knowing full well that his idea of *great art* is hopelessly logocentric) m