I found this article really interesting, of a caliber of analysis not often
published on this list. However, I don't know exactly what is meant by 'post
modernism'. To my thinking - at least as far as I remember - POMO is any
thought or art since the first moderns whom I classify as beginning with the
Socratic philosophers. Perhaps even the pre-socratics, even Pindar the poet. 

But apparently the meaning of pomo is much more restrictive and comprises
thought and art since the rationalist philosophers, perhaps Kant the
idealist. So I took the liberty (time) to get my source on the item called
pomo, Linda Hutcheon. She indicates that pomo is a term that is
'under-defined' and says that it has something worthy of salvage for rustic
aliens:

"Of all the terms bandied about in both current cultural theory and
contemporary writing on the arts, postmodernism must be the most over- and
under-defined. It is usually accompanied by a grand flourish of negativized
rhetoric: we hear of discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentring,
indeterminacy, and antitotalization.<4>"

She rejects almost all the "generally accepted 'tacit' definitions" and
comes up with her own. The presence of a postmodern theorizing is discerned
"in most art forms and many currents of thought today.... postmodernism is
fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably
political. Its contradictions may well be those of late capitalist society,
but whatever the cause, these contradictions are certainly manifest in the
important postmodern concept of 'the presence of the past'.<4>

Hutcheon takes her cue - so to speak -  from Paolo Portoghesi's analysis of
the twenty facades of the 'Strada Novissima' - "whose very newness lay
paradoxically in its historical parody - shows how architecture has been
rethinking modernism's purist break with history. This is not a nostalgic
return; it is a critical revisiting, an ironic dialogue with the past of
both art and society, a recalling of a critically shared vocabulary of
architectural forms." Placing the central feature of postmodernism in the
critical reflection on past forms (sounds like 'reflections of a golden eye'
or an archival memory being dug away or Batailles 'The Eye') where the
current industrial mass existential ready-to-consume-then-to-numb cultural
predicament is scorned - even repulsed - one can even think of Levi-Strauss
returning from Greenland with his ten aboriginals to have for observation in
polite and learned society awaiting him in New York. The famous
anthropologist, the founder of modern anthropology, lands in New York with
his captives who have little immunity to the diseases of Europeans. Within a
few months eight die, leaving two who are taken in and cared for by some
thoughtful humanitarians. The dead father of one native boy is not given a
proper burial, and instead the son observes a fake funeral where the body is
actually a wooden log wrapped in clothes. The father is not even buried but
his body is preserved and put on display in the Museum of  the
Anthropological Society of America. His son is told that his father is given
a proper burial so that his spirit can be put to rest to allay his worst
fears imaginable. The tradition of course is that the Inuit children must
bury the father since if there is no true burial the first son will be
sacrificed to the account for the restless spirit. When the son finally
discovers that his father is not properly buried he nearly has a test of
courage to continue on living. He demands the body of his father, and asks
that he be given a proper burial. The whole affair is published in the New
York Times newspaper.

"The past whose presence we claim is not a golden age to be recuperated" is
the seminal definition of postmodernism as it is situated for Hutcheon. She
of course contends that Portoghesi has provided a starting and lasting
definition of pomo inadvertantly. According to Hutcheon postmodernism is a
'critical reworking, never a nostalgic 'return'.

One of the purposes of postmodernism is to challenge "the totalizing forces"
of an "increasing uniformization of mass culture" <6> and "not deny" the
challenge, but it "...is to seek to assert difference, not homogenous
identity." The appeal perhaps to 'difference' is to assert not the opposite
of sameness, but rather, assert nothing op- or a-positive  to sameness such
as may suffice with the idea of 'otherness'.  Difference is embodied in
'problematizing' centralizing forces such as the 'They-systems' that
conflict with the 'We-systems' in a far fetched and simplistic neo-topian
world of them and us serio-type casting. 

Hiedegger alludes directly to this totalizing efficiency when he elaborates
on the conceptual event of 'enframing' which may be translated as 'the
set-up' of a system ready made, or prefabricated 'set-up' of a geo-political
thought system of consensus through compliance and unrestrained access to
'things' and 'devices'. Recently an article in the New Economist stated
there were more man-made things on the market today than the sum total of
all species on the earth. Many of which have a brief market life of about 3
months or less even. In fact Monsanto officials once declared that the
economic life of any pesticide was very short, perhaps less than a decade. 

So I think Hutcheon is correct...I cannot dispute her authority here...and I
think that pomo is something valuable as an activity, as a search for
meaning, as a "contradiction" then it is an activity of critical
investigation into the past. I think the value in "problematizing" versus
taking "solace in uncertainty" makes authentic postmodernism a true
imperative of responsibility in that the sum of an individual's
sensibilities are called forth in some sense to confront the nonsense we see
displayed on the visual media, the normalizing tendency of mass culture to
desensitize us against the intricacies of nature. 

That is the problem with demoting nature to the status of a fixed entity,
servant of humanity, rather than reflection on the creative process oriented
function of feeling that engenders a sense for nature, (instead of the
de-tached parts) in combination with it's directly intuited 'a-logos', the
intermediary fourth term, often neglected term, valuation or feeling, which
I have defined as 'undifferentiated thought' or what northy (alfred) says is
the 'feeling function' is left dysfunctional and atrophies adroitly. What is
more, pomo is a legitimate task that attempts to confront and "scrutinize"
institutions "from the media to the university, from museums to theaters.
Much postmodern dance, for instance, contests theatrical space by moving out
into the street" <9> and it "debate[s]...the margins and the boundaries of
social and artistic conventions" by typically "transgressing of previously
accepted limits." 

john foster






>Stacy Aliamo writes"
>At a recent conference, I attended a performance on ecofeminism that
>presented a convincing barrage of slides, mainly from advertisements,
>depicting women and the earth in similarly degrading ways. Sympathetic to
>the environmentalist and feminist politics, I was nonetheless dismayed by
>the finale, which baldly celebrated a slide of a naked, pregnant woman,
>implicitly evoking that old connection between the fertile female and the
>fecund earth. Within the context of the presentation, the spherical belly
>functioned as a maternal disciplining of the sexual "bad girls" exhibited in
>the advertisements, thus retreating to a Madonna/whore dualism that
>denigrates female sexuality even while naturalizing the female body as
>primarily procreative. I begin with this example to suggest that "woman" and
>"nature" converge upon a perilous terrain that solidifies the very
>representations of "woman" that feminism, especially poststructuralist or
>postmodern feminism, has worked to dislodge. 
>
>Poststructuralist or postmodern feminisms "denaturalize" the concept of
>"woman" itself, often disassociating it from the system of hierarchies
>(including body/mind, object/subject, etc.) that bind woman to an abject
>nature. Centuries of misogynist thought that has justified the oppression of
>women by casting women as "closer" to nature and that has made nature
>synonymous with essentialism has produced a discursive landscape which makes
>it nearly impossible to forge productive alliances between environmentalism
>and feminism without raising the doubly baneful double-entendre of a "female
>nature." If, as Judith Butler argues, the fixed, "immobilized," "paralyzed"
>referent of the category "woman" hampers feminist agency, and the "constant
>rifting" over the term "woman" is itself the "ungrounded ground of feminist
>theory" ("Contingent Foundations" 16), invoking nature or the natural risks
>further congealing the signification of "woman," thus foreclosing
>possibilities for feminist agency. 
>



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