Postmodernism

[Otto Sell]

Terrance, thank you for defending Derrida, thank you Heikki, Kevin, Evan and
Jbor. Especially yesterday's long post from Terrance. We're really captives
of the jargon. How to criticize Logocentrism if all we've got are words.

If Postmodernism was such an -ism like all the others before the question
about it would have arisen earlier - maybe it has. Guess I've read the term
"prepostmodern" for Sterne's Tristram Shandy several times. It's never the
ones living in a period that give the period its name. So who are we to say.
To me Postmodernism and Deconstruction is indeed more a tool of literary
criticism, helpful for interpretation, then a philosophical question -
hunting down those binaries along both roadsides, always turning, never
deciding to one side, always turning the screw one more over the turning
point was very helpful understanding "Our Man" and my own nightmarish
reality. GR is good for Germans and VL good for hippies, but of course he's
much wider. I loved the saying from "Political Pot": "Pynchon specifically
notes 500 years of metaphysics from the Renaissance to LSD." It's one of
those sentences you get stared upon by others when you say it, but it might
be useful for recognizing philosophers, ex-hippies and Pynchon-readers in a
crowd.

Kurt-Werner, you said "that the times of postmodernism and deconstructivsm
are over. The reason for this is that "anything goes" has led us into the
chaos of the world economy of today." - But your war-examples are examples
from the time after 1990 - thus <after> the period of time some people had
called Postmodernism was declared being dead now given the fact that one
pole of the big opposition had crumbled - and gave way to the chaos we now
encounter. Postmodernism is by definition not chaos but pluralism which is
the opposite of the ethnic cleansing we see in the post-postmodern wars.
It's precisely this "anything goes" statement and the reproach of pure
eclecticism that makes the literary difference between TRP and -my standard
example- R.A. Wilson or Lawrence Norfolk who were just a good read at a
time. You see, it really seems impossible to express meaning without
difference!

Writing this I remember a quote by Antonio Gramsci already used by Nadine
Gordimer and Salman Rushdie, though it of course fits for many situations.
But look at the binary elegance . . .

"The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there
arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms."
(Prison Notebooks)

Otto
-------------------------
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