GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[Dave Monroe]

Wow ... well, I won't have time to respond in full here--and pardon me for
bandwith insensitivity, will endeavor NOT to repost in its entirety every
posting I respond to (and every posting that posting is responding to, and so
forth ...)--but I will note, in re: chronology, well, I hope I didn't come off
as claiming that EVERYTHING written after a certain point, event, whatever, is
necessarily "postmodern" by virture of merely coming AFTER ... rather, what I
think I was trying to suggest is that certain ... qualities only emerge, can
only emerge, after a certain point, event, whatever, "postmodernism" coming,
say, largely in the wake of the tumults of WWII.  Which is not to say that
verything thereafter is postmodern, but which is to emphasize its historicity.
Was everything produced during the so-called Renaissance (but which one? and
where? in what field?) necessarily, er, "renaissance"?  Obvioulsy not, older
ways continued on, might well have survived even to this day, but nor could what
we do identify clearly as "renaissance" productions have emerged any earlier
Different temporalities, modalities, whatever in operation everywhere, always
... which, by the way, is not to suggest some sort of teleology, but, rather, to
counter telelogies, to acknowledge the supposedly less-(or, for that matter,
more-)developed Other AS contemporary, as a contemporary (see Johannes Fabian,
Time and the Other: How Anthropology Constructs its Object).  That "Kafka and
his Precursors" (Jorge Luis Borges) thing, perhaps, a precursory lineage is
only, an only be provided after the fact, but there is no necessary,
teleological dvelopment toward, say, Kafka.  And tehre are always those lines,
counterdevelopments (thinking of, say, that Burgess Shale here) which dissipate,
die out, go forgotten.  At any rate, bushmen and bacteria are still with us, and
will probably still be here when we're long gone ... and I don't know that I was
suggesting that The Great Gatsby was necessarily affirming Jay Gatz's indeed
problematic subjectivity.  Not so sure abut "tragedy," but I agree that it's
Nick who's the charcater du jour there.  Like Melville before him (The
Confidence Man), Fitzgerald indeed problematizes that much-vaunted American
social--and, ultimately, subjectival--mobility, those much-vaunted "self-made
men," which, by FSF's time, had indeed reached a critical point.  The ash heap,
The Waste-Land, indeed ...