(from a correspondence)
Your questions provide me with an opportunity for putting together some ideas and for clarifying exactly where I stand at present with respect to the so-called "postmodern debate." I believe that the author of a survey of post-modern theory written back in the '80's wrote something to the effect that there are as many definitions of post-modernism as there are people who have used the word in writing. The author estimated this number to be around 3000. I assume she was limiting her estimate to those authors writing in English. The figure is surely much larger by this time.
Looking at the distinction between modernism and post-modernism on a purely verbal level, and attempting to extract a working definition from various summaries of the debate I've read, it seems that there at one time was something called modernism which has given way to something related to the former term if only insofar as it is possible to assign to it a prefix indicating "coming after" - an idea related to the first one, perhaps as its antithesis, perhaps as its consequence...but evidently distanced from it in some way. Which, of course, is saying little more than nothing.
Anyway, it's a distinction that a lot of different people seem to have needed to make, apparently for a lot of different reasons. To help myself comprehend what the distinction means for me (and it certainly must mean something to me, otherwise I wouldn't be troubling myself with it), I suppose I first need to get at what I understand by the root-word "modern". What is the modern, anyway, and when does it begin?
My current view of history has been informed by my recent reading of Vico (odd-ball 18th-century Italian theorist of history who came up with the notion of cyclical history, which was ignored by everyone at the time but which much later resurfaced in Nietzsche and Joyce, among others), and by my re-readings of Nietzsche and of the Marx of The German Ideology. One of Nietzsche's central themes is the chance and largely fragile constitution of that happy period of human history that might be characterized as the European experiment. For Nietzsche (if you'll permit an abridgement of his views that is neither elegant nor complete), Europe throughout the better part of human history has formed both geographically and culturally little more than an insignificant appendage to the vast continent of Asia. By his account, the Greeks and Romans bequeathed to the western end of that vast Asian darkness a beacon of enlightenment which came close to being extinguished by the onslaught of Judeo-Christianity, which he understands as an attempt on the part of Asia to plunge the more or less enlightened world of the ancient Greeks and Romans back into the original human state of unenlightenment. According to Nietzsche, the European Enlightenment (i.e. the one that we know as the Enlightenment per se) represents a gradual emancipation of the European mind from the shackles of Christianity, and he tends to locate the beginnings of this enlightenment in the Italian Renaissance and the humanist movement that accompanied it. In his view the German Reformation under Luther was a reaction on the part of a sluggish and semi-barbaric European north that put enlightenment back more than a century, a reaction from which it only began to emerge around the time of Newton or so - a recovery that for Nietzsche had not yet come to completion and that was seriously jeopardized by the renewed reactionary forces of nationalism, philosophical pessimism, anti-Semitism, and socialism (which he understood as a byproduct of a spiritually enervating Christianity).
I have no desire to spend the next couple of hours seeking out choice textual references, though I have picked out a couple of things at random from my notes on Antichrist: "We are just catching up to where things were 2000 years ago, with the disadvantage that we are left with the bad residue of Christianity and Christian thinking." This is a paraphrase and not a quote. Also, "the Germans robbed Europe of the Renaissance." These two ideas seem to sum up pretty well Nietzsche's thoughts on enlightenment, both as the idea of liberation from intellectual darkness and as a proper name used to designate a specific movement in European history.)
Nietzsche would probably have been pleased to note the importance that subsequent historians have placed on the Black Death of the 14th-century in serving as an impetus to modernity by having established a fresh set of conditions that allowed Europe within the next century and a half to surpass all previous civilizations in terms of technological development and the material prosperity that goes with it: A saturated land to people ratio which had fed technological stagnation for a couple hundred years was drastically altered as a third to a half of the population died off within a few short years...The land initially fell into a state of desuetude as those who were left alive fled to the cities to avoid starvation due to the sudden lack of agricultural manpower, a state of affairs which led to the rise of trade and manufacture...New technologies were promulgated in order to recover the land and ensure that Europe wouldn't be completely starved off...etc.
To get to the point, I have been following Nietzsche in coming to understand European history as a fortunate accident - one, as well, that was bound to happen, with or without the Black Death, in one part of the globe or another (and this conception of the eventuality of the "European accident" happening somewhere if not in Europe is the element in what follows that I owe to Marxian conceptions). If it weren't for the Black Death, Europe may have continued on for another millenium in a state of pre-industrial timelessness - a timelessness that might have been prolonged even further if the Holy Roman Empire had ever succeeded in uniting Christian Europe politically, thus eliminating the benefits that ultimately redound to civilization through competition between nations (thus the fabled millennial stasis presented by the history of China, which, though not without its frequent turmoils and upheavals, has known itself as a geographical and political singularity to a far greater extent and for far longer than has Europe).
Suppose for a moment that the Black Death never happens and suppose that by 1800 Europe is little changed from the Europe of the 14th-century. Suppose that a catastrophe similar to the Black Death occurs in China, interrupting the timeless continuum of Chinese history. Suppose that after a recovery which takes a century or two the seeds are sown for an intellectual and technological revolution. The Chinese gradually discover that the planet on which we live revolves around the sun...They send out voyagers who seek an Eastern passage to the trade centers of Western Europe and the vast wealth of the Gold Coast and by accident discover the New World, which they proceed to pillage and populate...The Japanese, having maintained strong ties with the Asian mainland after their immigration around 1000 AD, eventually gain control of the seas and forge an industrial revolution which soon spreads to the continent (note: Japan is similarly situated to the Chinese mainland as Great Britain to continental Europe)...This industrial revolution, in turn, results in East Asian colonization of most of the rest of the world and the rapid dispersal of technology across the globe, which in turn sets off a population explosion, struggles between worker and capitalist, colonist and colonized, a couple of world wars, the invention of a form of weaponry with the potential to annihilate human life in a matter of seconds, an ecological crisis and its belated recognition, and, finally, an increasingly global culture and economy centered on intelligence and technology streaming out from a tiny portion of the globe at the eastern end of the once sleepy Asian continent.
Suppose that I am born sometime during the 24th-century in some remote area of Germany (where the Haas' would have stayed, owing to the New World having been discovered by East Asians rather than Western Europeans). Germany at this time...actually, there is no Germany, as the entirety of Europe west of the Caucasus is united sometime during the 17th-century under the name of Romana...Romana at this time is recovering from a catastrophic upheaval dubbed the "Great Cultural Revolution" which followed on the heels of the Second World War - a war in which Romana played a side-role, the struggle having been principally between the Allied powers of China, Japan and the New World against the Axis Powers of India, Indochina, and Australasia (with Russia sort of floundering back and forth between the two sides as it did during the history that we've known)...a war now viewed as a direct result of war reparations inflicted upon Indochina by the victors in the First World War. Romana has been severely weakened during this century and the second half of the previous one due to corruption of the languishing and incompetent Hapsburg Dynasty, British attempts to compete with East Asia through imperialist aggression on the European mainland, and by a population left exhausted by a civil war that happened concurrently with the war against the British. Millions of people died subsequently in the ill-conceived experiments in land redistribution of the so-called Cultural Revolution that took place under the "Great Helmsman" Guiseppe Fodor. Romana is presently at work remodeling its economy on the capitalist economies of East Asia in an effort to bring prosperity to its people.
I am born into an impoverished peasant family in the province of New Prussia. While still in adolescence I leave my family to join the wave of rural poor seeking urban prosperity and live a hand-to-mouth existence selling handicrafts to tourists in the cluttered and bicycle-ridden streets of Berlin. As I wander home I pass by Eastern-style shopping malls that cater to Romana's burgeoning middle class - a class from which I, having received the bare minimum of an education in an abject agrarian environment, am excluded. In the windows I catch glimpses of world-famous New World athletes and movie stars beaming out from display TV's, which cause me to think with envy on cousins I've never met in the New World, whose parents escaped Romana at the tail-end of the Cultural Revolution to seek a better life. If I were to meet them, we probably wouldn't be able to communicate, as I've never had the opportunity to study Japanese (the New World language...the sea-faring Japanese having been the first to colonize the New World), and as they've probably lost any Revised Latin they may have picked up from their parents earlier in life, who rarely spoke it anyway, anxious as they were for their children to quickly assimilate into a society in which people of European ancestry form a 5% minority.
Well, suppose that none of this ever happens, either. Suppose, instead, that both Europe and China continue on in medieval stasis. Meanwhile, the brutal, half-civilized Aztecs, living somewhere half-way down a land-mass entirely known to either Europe or China, manage to come under the spell of the ancient, mysterious, and largely forgotten Mayans, whose example provides a civilizing force and whose knowledge is passed down to the Aztecs in fragments. The Aztecs gradually push their way northwards into a climatic zone more conducive to sustained experiments in higher civilization and cause the plethora of northern peoples to come under their sway and to end their nomadic ways of life. The population of the North American continent begins to grow and eventually reaches a par with that of Europe or China circa 1350 AD. Now three major Northern Hemisphere civilizations await an epoch-making disaster like the Black Death that will free them from the bondage of pre-enlightened timelessness and fling them into an unknown, modern futurity...
Enough. I get this far in my ruminations only to discover what seems to be a philosophy of history informing what I refer to as my project. A philosophy based on a few simple principles, which might be thus stated:
1) Humanity at the time of this writing is involved in a crisis from which it very well may not emerge. At issue is its survival.
2) This crisis is the result of a set of developments initiated by a certain combination of fortuitous events. The history of this set of developments is short and intense when juxtaposed against the previous five millennia of recorded history and represents the decisive break in the human time-continuum.
3) If any of several factors had been different this particular set of developments never would have been triggered; however,
4) a similar set of developments would have transpired eventually, humanity having been programmed, either ontogenetically or philogenetically (or both), for such a crisis. Finally,
5) while a single individual cannot hope to come up with the answer on his or her own to the question as to whether humanity will survive its crisis, the least he or she can do is to keep the above four principles in mind. This may be all that one may ask of oneself in terms of an informed praxis.
Not much of a philosophy, perhaps, but one that will work well enough as a framework for the conception of post-modernism I wish to elaborate.
Coming around to the question at hand, I now attempt to define my own position in the postmodern debate in terms of the picture of modernity that has helped to elucidate the five principles listed above. A modernity that begins, neither with the European Enlightenment per se, nor with the Industrial Revolution, but with late-medieval humanism, broadly understood as a freeing up of the European intellect after a century's struggle to recover from the chaos caused by the Black Death. A modernity that happens inevitably among intelligent life-forms, perhaps happens only once on any given "Third Stone from the Sun" (to quote Jimi Hendrix), and that has probably happened and will happen again on innumerable, similarly fortunate stones scattered throughout the universe.
In getting closer to the modernism/post-modernism distinction, it is perhaps useful to consider what is meant by modernism in contradistinction to modernity. Modernism, it seems to me, is used in general to indicate, not the modern itself, but rather its "superstructural" products - i.e. the institutions, forms of expression, modes of living, techniques for transmitting knowledge, as well as the ideological or intellectual constructs informing all of the above (aesthetics, sociology, psychology, etc.). Moreover, in terms of a time-period, one designates with "modernism" not the modern in its entirety, but rather the tail-end of it. You might say that modernism represents the self-recognition of modernity and takes shape concurrently with the recognition of the crisis as I have described it above, though perhaps before the crisis has been fully defined or articulated.
For me the crucial distinction to be made is not between modernism and post-modernism, but between modernity (or the modern, as I have defined it) and post-modernity. The former distinction, I find, should be located within the latter. Post-modernity sets in when the Great March of Progress is checked by a series of man-made calamities - world wars, genocide, famine. The crisis that these calamities make evident follows on the heels of the Industrial Revolution in a matter of decades. It culminates in the invention of a Doomsday Machine that has the potential to wipe out all civilization. But it gradually transpires that the Doomsday Machine is not the real threat, as humanity is not programmed to self-destruct on a whim of the moment. The real threat only becomes evident in subsequent decades - the threat of a gradual but sure death through the systematic destruction of the natural resources that have fostered and sustained civilization. (I use the present tense throughout to remind myself that modernity and the crisis in which it culminates is not unique to our world and to our history but occurs wherever and whenever in the universe higher intelligence manages to take hold.)
So post-modernity for me is characterized by the precipitation of a crisis within modernity and its recognition. I believe I understand modernism as a superstructural transition between modernity and post-modernity. In the arts it takes shape as a movement or set of movements that last no more than several decades and that portray or realize in broad analogies a modernity and its self-defining and self-justifying notion of progress in frustration with itself. Modernism is an "immanent" movement in the Kantian sense in that it does no more than analyze the notion of progress and find it to be self-contradictory. Modernism is self-limiting in that, as in Adorno (who, in this respect, is the very center of modernist thought), it does not propose, seek, find, or envision any solution to the crisis and finds itself utterly thwarted by the antinomy of progress. In fact, it goes so far as to deny that civilization is even possible beyond the self-movement of progress. To put it another way, modernism "hypostatizes" the modern notion of progress, accepting it as a natural given.
In contrast, you might say of post-modernism that, spiritually, it is born of the crisis, and, temporally, after it or merely outside it. It sides with modernism in locating the origins of the crisis in the antinomy of progress, but it parts with it in that it no longer understands or "identifies" itself in terms of the crisis. It simply accepts the crisis as a fact to be dealt with or ignored, but certainly not to be mourned. For it recognizes that the crisis in fact produces certain undeniable benefits for those coming after. (Certain things, for instance, become easier and cheaper - the acquisition of information, travel across distant parts of the globe, the institutions of pleasure which in modern times are designated under the rubric "entertainment," etc.)
To spell things out a bit more clearly, the modernists are those who either in their youth or as adults witness the crisis in its unfolding and become the first generation to look the prospect of human annihilation squarely in the face. The post-modernists are those of us, in contrast, who have grown up with the fact from earliest youth. Fundamentally, we are not nostalgists. We have nothing to mourn, never having known things to be different. The modernists, however, are radical nostalgists who believe that all is lost without the utopian wholeness that the notion of progress held out for five hundred years as the great carrot stick of enlightenment. The 12-tone row, the grids of Mondrian, the vertical austerities of mid-century urban housing - they indicate through the gesture of renunciation everything that has been eliminated. It's entirely possible that the great artists of modernism did not feel any nostalgia personally and that they were perfectly content to work out the logic immanent to their particular arts. But the rest of us, as participants in their art, can hardly avoid feeling longing for the once-promised wholeness, now understood to be impossible.
I said above that we, as post-modernists, are anti-nostalgic. Well, that's not exactly true. There is a post-modern nostalgia. We are temporary and part-time fantasists of nostalgia, like Jean-Luc Picard aboard the Enterprise, who can as he wishes enter a room which allows him to entertain himself with visions of past wholeness - though we never suppose that he'd rather not emerge from these visions into his real life and responsibilities. Occasionally, for instance, we are neo-Nazis. Well, not you and I...but some of us out there. We dream of the restoration of a primordial wholeness through the eradication of an imaginary Evil Other. Occasionally we are religious fundamentalists and imagine that the ancient texts that have been relegated to folklore by modern textual analysis contain literal truth. Occasionally we are New World ideologues who imagine that the crisis with which we are now confronted would never have happened if it weren't for that most evil of Evil Others - the Dead White European Male. (New World Ideology is my term for ideologies such as so-called "political correctness" that I suppose to be only possible in New World environments...what they consist of - these New World environments and their ideologies, that is - is another issue altogether…though see below, "Norado Defended Against His Devotees".) Occasionally we are ideologues of the New World Order variety...a sibling movement to multi-culturalist, "PC" ideology and not its enemy as might be supposed...and dream that the utopian wholeness promised by modernity will soon be realized in an American-fronted "global community." As nostalgists, we post-moderns and post-modernists are weak (meaning dishonest and self-deceptive), in contrast to the modernists, who achieved their strength precisely through their radical nostalgia, which was a nostalgia for a defunct ideology and not, as with us, a nostalgia for a world-that-never-was or for a world-that-never-will-be. It is only as anti-nostalgists that we achieve our strength. Or, if we must long for wholenesses (as I admit that I do from time to time in my poems), it is for wholenesses that are never taken for more than they are - necessary fictions.
So that's how I understand the distinction between modernism and post-modernism - as a localized dichotomy within the bigger and more crucial movement from modernity to post-modernity. By way of elaboration, I'll begin by saying that I think it's fruitless to use such labels as stylistic categories, and that it's even misguided to label particular artists as either the one or the other. Rather, I would say that these terms might be used more productively to indicate tendencies that often exist side by side in a single work of art. I would even say that the distinction is more relevant to the manner in which we interpret things than to the object viewed in itself. Žižek, for instance, has shown (in Looking Awry, 1991) that it is possible to interpret Kafka along alternately modernist and post-modernist lines that offer equally compelling and mutually acceptable readings. On the modernist interpretation, the edifice which the protagonist endlessly circles in The Castle but that remains unapproachable and inaccessible is the mark of a void, an absence - transcendent, devoid of predicates, and radically uninterpretable. The post-modernist reading, however, points to the all-too-real presence that undeniably fills out the void's absence - the seductive washerwomen and obscene workmen who constantly emerge from its perimeter. The void, it turns out, is a cauldron of sensuality - enticing, nauseating, and grotesque..."a collection following a kind of aleatoric logic of enjoyment." Thus, the transcendent wholeness of the modernist interpretation turns out to be a nauseating surfeit of reality on the post-modernist interpretation, which seems to suggest that what you long for (as a modernist) is what you get (as a post-modernist).
How might one have a go at an interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg that would combine ostensibly modernist and post-modernist readings? One might begin by suggesting that atonal works do not circumscribe a void or central absence as in the novel by Kafka, but rather that the atonal style itself alludes through an art of exclusion to a former wholeness (i.e. available in tonality) that has been eliminated. This would be on the modernist side. On the post-modernist side, one might begin by discounting any interpretations that seek to understand the music in terms of an absence (for instance, an absence of tonal perameters). This is ostensibly what the old "pitch-class set theory" did. I find that theory to be entirely modernist, however, in that it anxiously seeks to find principles of order comparable to those of tonal organization behind what was perceived in 1910 and what has been perceived by general listeners ever since as a systematic lack of order, as it were. This, of course, is not to say that Schoenberg's music is fundamentally disorderly and lacking in structural coherence, but simply to suggest that all interpretations of this music that seek primarily to discover its principles of coherence miss the point and are ultimately nostalgic and weakly modernist. A genuinely post-modern reading might simply emphasize what we really hear when we listen to Schoenberg and why we are still alternately thrilled and disturbed by him - a riot, a festival of unpermitted sound...one that is simultaneously seductive and nauseating and that perhaps even suggests a sticky presence filling out the voids circumscribed in tonal works since late Beethoven (such voids are analyzed by Adorno in his interpretation of Beethoven via the category of "silence"). On this interpretation, it would be the works of late tonality that would be properly viewed as "modernist," in opposition to the "post-modernist" works of Schoenbergian atonality.
I'll complete this long-winded discursus with an attempt at an analysis of one of my own poems - one of my half dozen or so favorites from among the things I've written - a poem that composed itself in less than an hour:
At Large
It reminded some of joy, others of anguish,
though no one knew precisely what it was.
We all declared it a miracle of language,
though even that it was we accepted on trust.
The people lined up fender to fender –
it had this way of stealing a crowd’s attention.
But how it looked and sounded no one remembered,
or if they did it was never mentioned.
There were revelers involved as well as mourners.
Only later did I think how I was faring.
I felt like an old man on a corner
hawking curios of my painted self at large.
After pausing awhile to gather my bearings
I continued along in my errands,
bound to repeat the greetings with which I was charged.
On the modernist side, you have an event that has transpired, that has attracted a crowd of onlookers, some of whom have rejoiced at the event, while others have mourned (the revelers and mourners), though no one remembers exactly what happened. You also have the narrator - an individual who is simultaneously of the crowd and outside it, as individuals who make up crowds generally are. There's the feeling of longing - "if only we could remember what happened." Also, the question as to the "being" of the event and everything modernist that that conjures up ("though even that it was...").
On the post-modernist side you have the revelation that possibly everyone did, in fact, remember what happened but just didn't want to mention it, for whatever reason. You have the profound indifference of the narrator - whatever happened made him feel neither joyful nor sad, but merely sunken and decrepit. Then you have his bizarre means of earning a living which consists of selling miniature self-portraits of the narrator carrying out various mundane activities - maybe helping a child blow up a balloon, maybe getting caught in a storm without an umbrella, maybe attempting to sell his portraits to curious passers-by. Finally, you have the narrator continuing on with his life in an equally unsettling indifference to his daily routine, consisting as it does of a repetition of greetings - perhaps he's a doorman or a bellboy when he's not selling self-portraits.
Thus you have a modernist void - something that has been forgotten - filled out by a presence consisting of bodily decay and repetitions that are without meaning but that apparently sustain life.
Thus Gilchrist Haas on modernism and post-modernism. I doubt my views are either very original or very compelling. When I compare my understanding of history with that of, say, Foucault or Žižek, I feel that it is sketchy, fanciful, overly comprehensive, and certainly naive. These views, however, have helped me write my poems.
A few concluding remarks on my understanding of recent music history. I think it's difficult to discuss music in terms of the modernist/post-modernist distinction that has been useful in the analysis of painting, architecture, literature, film, theater, etc. The reason for this is that any attempt to divide recent music up into modernist and post-modernist artists or styles will inevitably result in a superficial and uncritical elevation of popular music at the expense of the European tradition. This is probably inevitable as the techniques of production and distribution which enabled the unprecedented flourishing of the art of song (which is really what popular music is) were developed at the same time as the crisis as I have defined it was being identified and the seeds of post-modernism sown. Within decades, the entire tradition since Gregorian chant was, if not in word then in deed, declared defunct and the sophistication of oral, "vulgar" forms was enabled, thus ensuring a rupture in musical art of the 20th-century - a rupture perhaps more significant, perhaps more truly epochal, than anything to which it might be compared in the other arts. I believe we're still too close to this unprecedented event to really understand it, and that the modernist/post-modernist distinction is ultimately not the answer. Instead, I'd like to think that the abrupt shift in artistic and aesthetic legitimacy from the musical forms and manners which dominated Western music for centuries (at least the music that was remembered from generation to generation) to the demotic art of song is perhaps the most emblematic "superstructural" event in the transition from modernity as I've defined it to a post-modernity in which the very survival of the human is at stake.