More on Postmodernism

In my own little discipline, music, we find the term "postmodern" attached most frequently (or second-most frequently) to something that was called, ten years ago, "new musicology." This was an ostensibly diverse and diffuse collection of scholars interested in liberating the field of musicology from what they came to see as a dogmatic and restrictive tradition. New musicologists were interested in using a larger tool kit than the academic study of music had previously permitted. Consequently, they came to talk of "postmodern modes of analysis," which included narrative of personal experience, overt politicization of criticism, and hermeneutics.

Now, the marriage of postmodernism to these specific sites (narratives, politics and hermeneutics) is a strange one indeed. One will quickly note that these are precisely the hallmarks, as Gilles Hooper has noted, of modernism in so many other fields. The problematics of narrativity and its dissolution or delegitimization are central concerns in both Jameson's and Lyotard's texts on postmodernism; Adorno (to pick an easy one) is amongst the most political of music critics/philosophers (and, not coincidentally, is a favorite father for many of these postmodernists); and Derrida--maybe one of the strongest thinkers we might be able to call postmodern, if that word will end up meaning anything useful--has, from a certain point of view, organized his intellectual carreer around dismantling hermeneutics, and has said so explicitly in interview. So why, if the modernist tradition has so greatly enjoyed political, hermeneutic narratives, would a group of scholars trying to find a space for that sort of work appellate themselves as postmodernists?

The answer, I believe, can be found in the broader use of the term, and is, of course, strategic. In the broader field, as in music, postmodernism was coined to claim a historical rupture at the cite of a repetition. (I'm putting aside the very useful architectural meaning of the word, where it refers to a more or less specific style, and instead examining it as a "mode of analysis.") Now modernism is itself based on a sort of rupture, and perhaps this is why there is confusion. Habermas remarks that modernism emerges from the appropriation of the classical away from antiquity. The word "modern" came into general use to distinguish a particular culture's relationship to a very specific past: most commonly this is between Europe and the ancient Greeks and Romans. As time wore on, this comparison lost its edge. Culture was changing rapidly enough, and was leaving such a (comparitively) good record of its movements, that there needed to be more recent comparisons. Modernism is the cultural practice of these shifting comparisons, where the vanishing present constructs itself in relationship to its own mythical past. It is Schoenberg composing after Brahms and Mahler composing after Wagner; it is Pollack after the Social Realists, and Stella after Mondrian; it's every poet that Bloom talks about in The Anxiety of Influence--maybe it is influence. The moving targets of the past are martialled to justify and motivate the cultural production of the present (this conception of modernism is at least partially at odds with Greenberg's distinction between modernism and the avant-garde, but I'll have to think through that elsewhere).

Postmodernism, to a very large extent, does the same thing. This is particularly true, I think, in cases of postmodern analysis or criticism, where the author is searching, in vain or otherwise, for a way to talk about art without simply being Michael Fried or Allen Forte. The same anxiety that can be read in the arts can be read in these analyses, and often is precisely what gives them strength and beauty.

In the arts it may be a different story. When James Meyer talks about Fried's notion of modernist painting, he talks about modernism giving itself life by facing the possibility of its own destruction. Much work that is considered postmodern cannot, I believe, be honestly considered in this light. Indeed, a great deal of postmodern work seems driven by the thought that art itself is stagnant and decaying. Which is often precisely what gives it strength and beauty.