GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[jbor]

> 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.
snip

No, not at all, but there will no doubt be those who apply this type of
historical genre approach to say something like: first there was Modernism
and then, because of the War, there was post-Modernism, and *now* there is
something else. Historians and historicists love to construct eras, but
postmodernism identifies that sort of thing as one of those grand
metanarratives which are a little bit shifty because they set up all sorts
of implicit value judgements. It places the historian or critic outside the
frame for a start, solipsistically in fact. Those who are credited with
"beginning" or "ending" an era generally have no idea that that's what it is
that they are doing: it's the subsequent reader of the texts who turns them
into innovators and iconoclasts. The example of "the Renaissance" is a good
one, not only for the fact that it was essentially a revival of Classical
modes and mentalities to begin with, but because it's absolutely a
construction after the event. So, while one art historian starts off "the
Early Renaissance" in oil painting with Cimabue or Giotto and Masaccio,
another, who wants to de-emphasise Christianity in her or his construction
of what "the Renaissance" was, might start with Uccello and Andrea Castagno.
Life doesn't separate itself up neatly into little parcels of history,
humans do that, logocentrically: "dividing the Creation finer and finer,
analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing
in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get
new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules
are words. . . . "

best

----------
>From: "Dave Monroe" <monroe at mpm.edu>
>To: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
>Subject: Re: GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb
>Date: Sun, Jul 2, 2000, 12:03 AM
>