postmodernism an introduction. preliminary thesis on dictionary of the khazars like the odyssey,...

Postmodernism

An Introduction

Preliminary Thesis on Dictionary of the

KhazarsLike the Odyssey, Dictionary of the

Khazars, in its attempt to explore how human beings construct meaning for themselves, straddles both historical eras (the modern and postmodern) and poetic technologies (the printed book and the hypertext).

I tried to change the way of the reading increasing the role and responsibility of the reader in the process of creating a novel (let us not forget that in the world there are much more talented readers than talented authors and literary critics). I have left to them, to the readers, the decision about the choice of the plots and the development of the situations in the novel: where the reading will begin, and where it will end, even the decision about the destiny of the main characters. But in order to change the way of reading, I had to change the way of writing. Therefore these lines should not be understood exclusively as a talk about the form of the novel. This is at the same time both a talk of its content. In fact, the content of any novel has been, so to say, on Procrustes’ bed for two thousand years always subjected to the merciless model of form. I believe that an end has come to this. Each novel should select its specific form, each story can search for, and find, its adequate body. Computer is teaching us it is possible.

But if you do not like computers, have a look at what architecture is teaching us. Architecture changes our way of life.

A literary work, if we consider it as a house, can change our way of life. A novel can be a home as well. At least for a while.

--Milorad Pavic

What is Postmodernism?• An Oxymoron?

What is Postmodernism?• An Oxymoron?• An overused and meaningless

term?

What is Postmodernism?• An Oxymoron?• An overused and meaningless

term?• A bunch of nonsense?

What is Postmodernism?• An Oxymoron?• An overused and meaningless term?• A bunch of nonsense?

• Postmodernism, as commonly articulated from a divergent set of subject-positions in a discursive environment characterized by post-industrial, post-colonial, post-feminist, post-Marxist strategies of resistance to the phallocentric valorization of panoptic strategies of hegemony, falls prey to a host of (mis)representations and de/valorizations emerging from the (de)centered plurivocalities of late-twentieth-century global capitalism(s).

What is Postmodernism?• An Oxymoron?• An overused and meaningless term?• A bunch of nonsense?• A “response” (or, “responses”) to

modernism.

What is Modernism?• A (post-) Enlightenment

belief in progress• Francis Bacon (1561-

1626) believed a wise, ethical, science-minded elite would bring a stream of progress to civilization

What is Modernism?• A (post-) Enlightenment

belief in progress• Francis Bacon (1561-

1626)• G.W.F. Hegel (1770-

1831)--Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis.

What is Modernism?• A (post-) Enlightenment

belief in progress• Francis Bacon (1561-

1626)• G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)• Karl Marx (1818-1883)

envisioned an (eventual) utopia.

The Enlightenment’s Biggest Party-Pooper:

Has Modernism Fulfilled its Promise?

Has Modernism Fulfilled its Promise?

Has Modernism Fulfilled its Promise?

Has Modernism Fulfilled its Promise?

After the leaves have fallen, we return

To a plain sense of things. It is as if

We had come to an end of the imagination,

Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective

For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.

The great structure has become a minor house.

No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.

The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.

A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition

In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had

Itself to be imagined. The great pond,

The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,

Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, a silence of a rat come out to see,

The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this

Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,

Required, as a necessity requires.

The Plain Sense of Things

by Wallace Stevens

Hemmingway’s “Prayer”Our nada who art in nada,

nada be thy name, thy kingdom nada,

thy will be nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada;

pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing,

nothing is with thee.(“A Clean, Well-lighted Place”)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all convictions, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. . .

W.B. Yeats. “The Second Coming”

But some still seek a center:

T.S. Eliot:

“The Wasteland”

James Joyce:

Ulysses

Pablo Picasso: “not what you see, but what you know is there”

Jean-Francois Lyotard• Argued (contra Lacan) that the

unconscious is not a “language” but figural and dream-like

• The figural resists representation• In 1974 he predicted that no

knowledge will survive that cannot be translated into computer language--into quantities of information.

• Made critical distinction between narrative discourse and scientific discourse

What is narrative discourse?

• “Here is the myth of Bumba, vomiting the moon and the stars, as I’ve always heard it chanted.”

• Legitimized in the telling.• Mythic time/narrative time (and

space)

What is scientific discourse?

• Scientist make denotative statements: “moon is a term that denotes a material body which rotates and orbits around the planet.”

• But how is this “language game legitimated?• Political narrative: French Revolution/Age of

Reason narrative of freedom• Philosophical narrative: Hegel’s unity of

knowledge (the gradual evolution of the human “spirit”)

Lyotard called these METANARRATIVES.

But is this how science works?

• Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?

• Quantum Physics• Can we really say that science has

led us to greater political freedom a spiritual evolution?

• And yet . . .

Science still seems to be a legitimate (the most?) discourse because it is performative, and performativity (alone) legitimizes it . . . and for Lyotard, Postmodernity is the rejection of all METANARRATIVES . . . with life still going on . . .

Fredric Jameson• Postmodernism is an

intensification and latest phase of global capitalism

• Reality is evaporating into mere images

• We’re fixated on commodities and products

• There is no linguistic normality, only pastiche

Like Fight Club

Jean Baudrillard• Death of modernity, “the

real,” and sex• Semiotic analysis of

commodities• binary oppositions that

minimize difference(s)• the simulation, simulacra,

becomes the real• The role of the hyper-real• The Merchants of

Cool/Reality TV

Ihab HassanModernism Postmodernism

Form (conjuctive/closed) Antiform (disjunctive/open)Design ChanceHierarchy AnarchyArt Object/Finished Process/Performance

HappeningPresence AbsenceCentering DispersalGenre/Boundary Text/IntertextRoot/Depth Rhizome/Surface

The Queen of Pop

Other Big Names:

Michel FoucaultJacques Derrida

Gilles Deleuze Felix Guattari

Compression of Time & SpaceThe Post-human era of the Cyborg

Rachel: “You’re not going to bed with a woman . . . remember;

though, don’t think about it, just do it. Don’t pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it’s dreary for us both.”-- “Blade Runner”Sean Young as “Rachel”

Preliminary Thesis on Dictionary of the Khazars

Like the Odyssey, Dictionary of the Khazars, in its attempt to explore how human beings construct meaning for themselves, straddles both historical eras (the modern and postmodern) and poetic technologies (the printed book and the hypertext).

Narrower Thesis: The Dictionary of the Khazars critiques the Encyclopedia Metanarrative and suggests to us that the only place of refuge, the only place of reality left for us, is in our dreams, the place of our deepest longings and desires, a place beyond metanarratives, space, and time.

Narrower Thesis: The Dictionary of the Khazars critiques the Encyclopedia Metanarrative and suggests to us that the only place of refuge, the only place of reality left for us, is in our dreams, the place of our deepest longings and desires, a place beyond space and time.

What areas of the text do you tend to want to “skim” over? Which sections grab you?

Do you feel naked without a book?

p.79

Dictionary of the Khazars1. According to the Pavic's "fiction" of the history of the

Dictionary of the Khazars, what is the relationship between the book you are holding in your hands and the earlier versions? Do you have any reason to believe your edition is reliable?

2. What conventions of literary authority does Pavic employ in the frontspiece, title page(s), and introduction? (In other words, what features of the text suggest to you that you are reading a scholarly, and therefore "reliable," text?) How do these authoritative devices undermine themselves?

3. What does the epitaph mean: "Here lies the reader/who will never open this book./He is here forever dead."?