[First published in Canadian Literature 120 (Spring 1989): 225-27.

[Index: postmodernism, literary theory]

[Date: April 1989]

Postmodernism

Michael H. Keefer

Review of John Fekete, ed., Life After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture
(New World Perspectives, 1987); Stanley Fogel, The Postmodern University: Essays on
the Deconstruction of the Humanities (ECW Press, 1988); and Arthur Kroker and David
Cook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics (New World
Perspectives, 1986)

The notion of postmodernity, though current in literary discourse since the 1960's,
has during the past decade become the subject of vigorous theoretical debates involving
Jean-Franois Lyotard, Jrgen Habermas, Richard Rorty and Terry Eagleton, among
others. Any attempt to define postmodernism is thus likely to seem contentiousnot least
because, as Linda Hutcheon has remarked in A Poetics of Postmodernism, the term shares
with the grand flourish of negativized rhetoric that habitually accompanies it (words
like 'discontinuity,' 'indeterminacy' and 'antitotalization') the paradoxical property of
incorporating that which it disavows.
But whatever their evaluations of this tendency, most interpreters would accept
Lyotard's description of the postmodern stance as one of incredulity towards
metanarrativesin particular those of the liberation of humanity and of the speculative
unity of human knowledge, which have separately legitimized the institutions of
humanistic and of scientific research, and which come together in the grand rcit of
Marxism. The cultural politics of postmodernism, while incorporating deconstructive
hermeneutics and a corresponding suspicion of institutional forms of knowledge and

power, thus also involve resistance to any kind of totalizing impulse, whether Hegelian,
Marxist or neoconservative. The result, not surprisingly, is paradoxical: an insistence (to
paraphrase Lyotard's bleakly playful formulation) on presenting the unpresentable, and on
refusing both the solace of good forms and any nostalgia for the unattainable.
The books under review offer several very different Canadian perspectives upon
this deliberately amorphous tendency. Stanley Fogel's book (to start at the shallow end of
the pool) will disappoint any reader expecting a sustained analysis of, for example, the
university's role in legitimizing and reproducing the present social order. Its central
section consists of a grab-bag of literary piecestwo review essays (lively, but
perishable), articles on Pynchon and on freeplay in postmodern fiction, and an essay on
John Barth which, being written to him as well, displays some of the rhetorical
peculiarities of prayer, among them that of telling the addressee things which he might be
supposed already to know. These are followed by some short, cheerfully iconoclastic
texts written in the manner of Roland Barthes' Mythologies, but lacking the semiological
and political acuity which made that book compelling. Only in the two theoretical essays
which constitute its first section, then, does The Postmodern University do much to earn
its title. Self-regarding, stylistically clumsy and too often based upon secondary responses
to theoretical texts, these essays manage nonetheless to make some forceful, if scarcely
novel, pointsabout, for example, the parallel decomposition of narrative forms and of
institutional metanarratives at the hands of postmodern fabulists and theorists, about the
fatal ease with which a merely content-oriented postmodernism can be neutralized within
the universities, and about the manner in which the controllers of those subjects with the
shakiest claims to grounding, with perhaps the most anarchic materials, resist most
mightily any kind of structural tinkering. But while challenging the authoritarian tilt of
the humanities, Fogel himself allows name-calling and appeals to authority to take the
place of argument, as when he writes off representational mimesis by quoting a sentence
of Derrida, or attacks the CanLit critics as propagandists engaged in literary empire
buildingat the same time failing to see that his own canon of mostly white male, and
American writers might expose him, if one wanted to talk about empires, to more
damaging charges.
The essays assembled by John Fekete in Life After Postmodernism throw the
reader at once into deeper waterwhich is sometimes also muddy, as in Charles Levin's
wearisome attempt to stir motifs from psychoanalysis and art criticism together into a

discourse on value; sometimes fast-moving, as in Susan Stewart's sparkling essay on

graffiti as crime and art; and more often clear and still, as in Jay Bernstein's finely written
essay on aesthetic alienation, Arkady Plotnitsky's post-Derridean recovery of a
Nietzschean concern with questions of value, Gyrgy Mrkus's questioning of the
totalizing impulse in Gadamer's hermeneutics, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith's meditation
on Value without Truth-Value. Fekete's reasons for bringing these essays together are
explained in his own strenuously lucid contributions to the book. Remarking that the
familiar modernist and positivist antinomies of object and representation, of unvalidated
fact and subjective value, have been suspended by a postmodern paradigm in which all
interpretive activities are seen as conditioned by prior experience and prejudicesin
short, by values, he sees an opening for a renewed discourse on issues of value. Fekete's
strategy is to represent value as underlying and subsuming the terms of poststructuralist
and postmodernist discourse. Value is a circulating medium, he proposes, of which both
the subject and the object terms of discourse are effectsthough active and productive
ones. He would thus reverse the structuralists' exclusion of value judgments from literary
criticism (an exclusion which quietly ratified established literary canons and evaluative
authorities), and at the same time would challenge the poststructuralist emptying of the
human subject, and in particular of the author.
This may all seem rather austere. And indeed, one problem with Fekete's attempt
to give priority to an emergent postmodern discourse on value is that he never shows
concretely how it would alter the ways in which we currently produce and receive texts.
Another obstacle to his project can be summed up in the name of Jean Baudrillard, a key
postmodern theorist whose recent work happens to be unreservedly nihilist. Baudrillard's
theorizing of what Fekete calls a culture of vampire value, in which dematerialized,
dead value and disseminated, dead power feed upon and deform human desires is
uneasily absorbed in Fekete's own contributions, but re-emerges in the ecstatic nihilism of
the essay by Arthur Kroker with which the book concludes.
It is Baudrillard, again, who has pulled the plug in The Postmodern Scene. By his
analysis, social relations are being emptied and symbolically destroyed less through the
ownership of the means of production than through control of the signifying codes by
which human exchange-relations are regulated. Rather than seeking to challenge this
control, however, Baudrillard advocates a perverse acquiescence in consumerism: a
passive consent to every conceivable form of excess will, he supposes, abolish the system

by forcing it into hyperlogic.

One might want to argue on behalf of Arthur Kroker and David Cook that their
maelstrom rhetoric is as much a parody as an imitation of Baudrillard's recent textsfor
they seem both to acquiesce in and attempt to exceed his analyses ('hyper' is their
favourite prefix). But the result, all too often, is something we can identify, with a bow to
Hunter S. Thompson, as Gonzo theory. Although The Postmodern Scene includes
perceptive essays on such figures as Barthes, Foucault, and Serres, much of the book is
marked by a deliberate hysteria, a persistent de-materializing of causality, a frequent
recourse to such universals as 'the will' and 'the body' (ironic, given the concern of
poststructuralism to deconstruct universals), and by the substitution of an oracular and
universalizing 'we' for sustained argument. Kroker is at his silliest when, in an oddly
pompous essay, he acclaims St. Augustine as the first, and most eloquent, of modern
structuralists, and finds in his writings (of which, by the way, he shows few signs of
direct knowledge) the dividing line between classicism, the discourse of modernism, and
its postmodern fate. His and Cook's readings of visual images are sometimes equally
unreliable. (In Mark Gertler's painting Merry-go-round [1916]the beginning, by their
account, of postmodern politicsthey see only soldiers, sailors and businessmen. Yet at
least six of the fifteen figures in this painting are female.)
How should one respond to this collection of essays? Perhaps by quotingas a
counter to the authors' lapses into nihilismthe words of John Fekete in the introduction
to his book: We need to believe and enact the belief that there are better and worse ways
to live the pluralism of value. To see all cows as the same colour would truly amount to
being lost in the night.