Poststructuralism and Postmodernism Simplifying to the extreme I

Poststructuralism and Postmodernism

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. ” “I shall call modern that art which. . . presents the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible. ” - Jean Francois Lyotard

Sublime, simulacra, uncanny, bricolage, deconstruction, hyperreality, kitsch, panopticon, pastiche, palimpset

Freud: the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. Shelling: Unheimlich is the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light. Freud: the uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.

But is there really a strange world? Of course. Are there, then, two worlds? Not at all. There is only our own world and it alone is alien to us, intrinsically so by virtue of its lack of mysteries. If only it actually were deranged by invisible powers, if only it were susceptible to real strangeness, perhaps it would seem more like a home to us, and less like an empty room filled with the echoes of this dreadful improvising. To think that we might have found comfort in a world suited to our nature, only to end up in one so resoundingly strange!” ― Thomas Ligotti, Song of a Dead Dreamer

[Postmodernism] consists not in demonstrating that the game works without an object, that the play is set in motion by a central absence, but rather in displaying the object directly, allowing it to make visible its own indifferent and arbitrary character. - Slavoj Zizek, “The Obscene Object of Postmodernity”

Philip Larkin (1922 -1985) This Be The Verse They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.

Drew Milne, ‘Go Figure’ (2003) This imperium’s eagle spreads ancient wings as the saying goes ahem friends Romans and globalists most dextrous ego-surfers of the remotest control say go fiigure let slip the bristling clusters and gas from each harsh Doric column stabbed long and hard into a ruin of sea and dimpled air most cleaving indeifference over physical features that depict no political borders lost upon spicy chicken wings as claws do special resolutions in pink cartoons nails down tankers the chalk on bord thing and the gas is all for oil, galley slave of this grade class fellow-guzzling petrol

from Jacques Derrida, Aporias What was going to be at stake in this word (aporia) was the ‘not knowing where to go. ’ It had to be a matter of the onpassage, or rather from the experience of the nonpassage, paralyzing us in this separation in a way that is not necessarily negative: before a door, a threshold, a border, a line, or simply he edge or the approach of the other as such. It should be a matter of what, in sum, appears to block our way or separate us in the very place where it would no longer be possible to constitute a problem, a project, or a projection, that is, at the point where the very project or the problematic task becomes impossible and where we are exposed, absolutely without protection, without problem, and without prothesis, without possible substitution, singularity exposed in our absolute and absolutely naked uniqueness, that is to say, disarmed, delievered to the other, incapable even of sheltering ourselves behind what could still protect the interiority of a secret.

The question of knowing what it means ‘to experience the aporia, ’ indeed to put into operation the aporia, remains. It is not necessarily a failure or a simple paralysis, but sterile negativity of the impasse. It is neither stopping at it nor overcoming it. (When somone suggests to you a solution for escaping an impasse, you can be almost sure that he is ceasing to understand, assuming that he had understood anything up to that point. ) Let us ask: what takes place, what comes to pass with the aporia? Is it possible to undergo or to experience the aporia, the aporia as such? Is it then a question of the aporia as such? Of a scandal arising to suspend a certain viability? Does one then pass through this aporia? Or is one immobilized before threshold, to the point of having to turn around and seek out another way, the way without method or outlet of a Holzweg or a turning that could turn the aporia – all such possibilities of wandering?

Flaubert’s Parrot highlights the joining of the postmodern interpretation of history with the necessity of establishing a saving ethic system, which characterizesthe British “new humanism. ” For Geoffrey Braithwaite, the protagonist of the novel, reality means not the identification of an ultimate structuring plan or finding absolutemeaning, but his openness to get involved in the search for meaning and in theattempt to recuperate the past. Geoffrey Braithwaite is aware of both theimpossibility of the past to be integrally regained and the fact that discourses onlyapproximate the disparate data of history; despite this and the degrees of imaginationas to the past, the line of reality must never be disregarded, since it limits ourfabulatory capacity. Barnes’ reaction to the historical relativism is not acontemplative one; on the contrary, it is one of uneasiness since the novelist isconcerned with the human constants that confer universal signification to existenceagainst the variable masks of transitory discourses. ECATERINA PĂTRAŞCU