As someone whose academic and artistic work tends to revolve around various critical concepts of intermediality, with a general and passionate fixation on the blurring of mediums and boundaries between disciplines, I have a somewhat awkward confession to make.
Honestly, there are times when pop-culture's (and particularly consumer-culture's) emphasis on the "multi-media" weirds me the hell out.
I feel like a bit of a hypocrite saying this, back-pedalling, trying to explain how what I'm referring to is somehow different from what "I" do, as I research the role of music in Literature or vice-versa, or stress the importance of videos I make for a more thorough understanding of my musical-output that they accompany... (I know. How very un-post-modern [or un-post-post-modern/ un-"reconstructionist"] of me to try to distance my own work from pop-culture. This is an observation, not a theory, so I offer no direct apology). It is what it is.
I first jotted some of these thoughts down in a notebook a few years ago, while I was searching for a gift for a family-member. I was looking for an electronic-device that performed a single task in a simple, easy-to-use manner. I had owned a similar device years prior, so I knew that the technology existed... and honestly, as a musician who's a bit of a gear-nerd, I knew of quite a few ways to accomplish the task in question. Problem was, at the time, there were plenty of devices on the market that could handle this simple audio task.... in addition to a plethora of other far more complicated tasks that wouldn't be used and would render the device far too uselessly complex for the person it was intended for. Poking around in the stereo-equipment section, I was invariably directed to the "home theatre" section, to which I groaned. "Oh, we have plenty of things that do that... as a side-effect of all this neat video-stuff that they can also do!" Another groan. "No, those features will not be used." I wanted a device that accomplished a strictly-audio task simply and efficiently. There was nothing on the market at the time that did what I wanted it to (outboard, without needing to be plugged into a computer) that didn't also have a visual-component.
For some reason, these frustrations led me to think of how distasteful I found the "Bohemian Rhapsody" sequence of "Wayne's World" the first time I saw it. The Queen song had long-conjured its own set of mental images for me. The aesthetics associated with that song in the film, Garth and Wayne headbanging, provided such a harsh juxtaposition with my own imaginative constructs for the song. Afterward, it irked me irrationally and uncontrollably to no end that, among kids my age, whenever that song came on, the point-of-reference was inevitably "Wayne's World," rather than the dense operatic aesthetic landscape I'd constructed in my mind. {for the record, this no longer bothers me in the least. I was pretty young when that movie came out, and "A Night at the Opera" was the first record I ever purchased, so childhood feelings about this subject were rather biased and passionate.}
{contrast audio-associated aesthetic imagery and perceive intermedial dischord.}
{On a somewhat unrelated note, I'm developing an ever-more-detailed theory about how much you can tell about a person based on their opinion of Queen. I'm only partially kidding.}
Similarly, around the same time, I heard an article on NPR about how Disney's "Fantasia" shaped the way that entire generations qualified classical music with aesthetic imagery. (I think it was this article.) Although I found this story/ review fascinating, it also made me feel somewhat dirty. There's something deeply strange about how this classical content, works by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Stravinsky, etc, was reshuffled, repurposed, re-imagined, and re-aestheticized forever in the collective consciousness.... by a cartoon.
As Lloyd Schwartz says in his NPR review of the Fantasia rerelease, "for kids, it's a delightful introduction to classical music. But bothFantasiafilms reveal how difficult it is to arrive at convincing images. Visual artists have to be deeply sensitive to music not to oversimplify, or betray, what's so deeply in the music." Maybe that's part of my discomfort, and the distinction I can't help but draw in my mind- pop-culture's use of "multi-media" tends to super-impose and interpret between mediums, whereas "intermediality" perceives and utilizes multiple mediums as components of an over-arching whole, multiple ways of understanding the same content, an ability for aspects of one medium to say things unable to be expressed with another, rather than a botched-translation from one format to another as if the vocabularies were entirely and seamlessly congruent? (See Deleuze and Guattari on mimicry versus Becoming?)
{I'm using this particular example not because it's the best-known and most narratively-accessible sequence from the film, but because the source-material for the musical-composition is literary [Goethe], which provides an additional layer of multi-media/ intermedial complication.}
I'll be the first to admit that, in all of these examples, the role of capitalism in our cultural reception of art is a large aspect of what I find off-putting... "You NEED more features... Why WOULDN'T we want our stuff to do more stuff??"... classic works of art repackaged and resold in more digestible forms to cater to a larger swath of the consumer population, scarring the new image-associations simultaneously to the parts of our brains receptive to the music, blocking our cognitive ability to let the music speak its own language... etcetera... {Breathe.}
Are these the only distinctions, though? As always, the line between audio (or any other medium) as product and audio as art is really blurry. I'm constantly trying to figure out where that line is, and how to most effectively discern and distinguish the force-fed "multi-media" that makes me feel like a dirty manipulated consumer from the uses of intermediality and the blurrings of boundaries between disciplines and distinctions that I find so vital and mentally-invigorating... Yet at the same time I'm entirely unsure as to why this line needs to be drawn or clarified at all.
In the meantime, exploring observational knee-jerks is always something I find important.
{Now, to cleanse your pallet, a bit of multi-media mind-candy I stumbled on while writing.}
My time is limited, since I'm knee-deep in research, so I have to make this quick... but there are a couple brief things that I wanted to point out.
First, you may remember a couple of months ago, provoked by a comment to a prior entry, I dove headlong (at least temporarily) into the heated ongoing debate about the name of the "era of thought" that we currently reside within, and what might come next, with a belated critique of Alan Kirby's 2006 essay "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond." (follow that link if you don't recall). Well, due (I presume) to the wonders that are Google, another blogger/ artist (with whom I am not personally acquainted) stumbled onto my piece while engaging in the conversation from his own angle. I am flattered to be cited on the reading-lists/ bibliographies for two consecutive entries of his blog, along-side such names as Derida and Lyotard. He has some really interesting things to say on the topic; I strongly encourage you all to head on over and take a read- The Art of John Bittinger Klomp.
Second, I want to congratulate Mr. Macalastair Ming (slide-guitarist for Tipsy Cougar, etc.) for currently having the most views on the new Asbjorn Collective Youtube Channel. One night recently, I really wanted to make some music, but didn't have time... so I challenged Ming to record something weird and post it. I'm not sure that I'd call what he posted "weird," but I would call it "good." Check it out. I'm glad to see there's finally content up on that channel that I'm not in, which is definitely one of the goals. While you're there, I just posted a new acoustic track tonight, and Wes Hopeless stopped by to add some old footage from The Green Sea days in Phoenix. If you're interested in contributing some material to our little odd-ball museum-collection, please be in touch. My friends be warned- I've now discovered that challenging talented people to produce content on short-notice is productive and fulfilling for all involved... so it WILL be happening on a more regular basis.
(I spent some time tossing around ideas about which of the numerous potential angles I should approach this from… and eventually threw up my hands and started writing, deciding to just run at it bull-in-china-shop style. So, if you’re interested in this debate, please bear with the length of this post, my occasional use of literary/ theory jargon, the possible failures of my attempt to keep this from devolving into a rant at times… etc. If any of this inspires a rebuttal, or ideas of any sort continuing the dialogue, I would LOVE to post them here. So, if you have something to say on this topic, be in touch .)
Ihab Hassan ended his 1987 essay “Toward the Concept of Postmodernism” by saying “One may wonder: Is some decisive historical mutation- involving art and science, high and low culture, the male and female principles, parts and wholes, involving the One and the Many- as pre-Socratics used to say- active in our midst? Or does the dismemberment of Orpheus prove no more than the mind’s need to make but one more construction of life’s mutabilities and human morality? And what construction lies beyond, behind, within, that construction?”
Contrasting these thoughts (which were presented as part of an attempt to define present and future parameters for the term “postmodernism”) with those suggested by Dr. Alan Kirby’s 2006 essay “The Death of Postemodernism and Beyond” that I linked in my last entry, suggests a rather troubling disconnect.
Frankly, the problem becomes that, as much as his cynical observations are often apt, the conclusions that Dr. Kirby draws from these conflict vastly with the prior works of Hassan and his critical peers that defined and refined the genre/ movement that Kirby so bombastically attempts to declare the death of.
The problem is, none of the observations that Kirby makes sit outside, as the changing cultural forces that he insists that they are, of the general parameters of the movement that he’s using them as validation for the disavowal and decease of.
Most solid theories of “postmodern thought” that I have read (including several of those that Kirby cites, in parts that he understandably yet problematically overlooks) leave plenty of room (and even often foresee) the cultural changes that Kirby asserts have rung its death-knoll.
As Hassan says, “Postmodernism implies a movement toward pervasive procedures, ubiquitous interactions, immanent codes, media, languages.” Oddly, if boiled into essential categories, these are all of the things that Kirby asserts as proof that contemporary culture is NOT a postmodern one.
Sure, I understand that there’s a bit of a time-period disconnect here as well. Kirby seems to be extremely willing to admit that our contemporary culture morphs astoundingly quickly, and unfortunately, this quickness proves the larger-scale undoing of his own points. The article that I’m referring to, “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond,” was published in 2006, and by his own standards, a lot has changed culturally in the three years since then.
Perhaps the most telling demonstration of the changes that those three years have made (particularly in terms of making his own conclusions seem cynical, short-sighted, self-defeating, and, in general, off-putting) comes from his own references to ‘living in a post-9/11 world’ (“pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in it’s rubble,” etc).
In 2006, it was FAR more acceptable (although barely… I’m pretty sure this was pretty close to the final throws of this cultural excuse) to write-off paranoia, surface-level-thinking, abhorrence of abstraction of any sort, over-moralizing, and ‘buckle-down-and-focus-on-“reality”’ sort of thought than it is to admit these sort of sentiments in civilized print (I.e. PhilosophyNow magazine, where the article initially ran) in mid-2009. I’m pretty sure it’s not taboo to think anymore… It’s acceptable again to not sit paranoid that any ideas that seem on the surface-level to lack relevance to day-to-day ethical/ easily perceived trivialities (I.e. the shortsighted assumption that the pop-culture dictates and guides thought, as Kirby is asserting, which is almost entirely negated by observations of any other past philosophical/ critical/ artistic movement… though that’s a whole different can of critical worms) might somehow appear disrespectful to those directly effected by the events of 2001 and the wars that followed, or that the “market economics” that Kirby correctly observes to have become such a cultural and intellectual focal point have dictated that any philosophical or ideological discussion about the relevance, value, or true possibility of “capitalist democracy” is somehow a betrayal to those who have fallen under the tires of the system and are struggling to make ends meet (Did you catch that, too? There’s an odd double-speak that reads between the lines of Kirby’s cynicism… his overall thesis seems laden with this cumbersome implication that it’s doing some grand disrespect to those that have been beat down and silenced by the system to speak out against it or attempt to step outside of it… he’s telling us to sit down and shut up, because that’s what our cultural-moment warrants. This strikes me as typical “post-9/11 world”-style fear-mongering… which of course makes all Kirby’s references to “Big Brother” (the TV show) deeply ironic due to the title of that program’s source-text.)
(Of course, the biggest irony in these claims is that, if the conclusions about our contemporary thought-processes that Kirby’s drawing were true, why would anyone have bothered to read his article?)
In fact, it seems that Kirby’s conclusions present, ironically, a death of this “post-9/11 world” mentality to a greater extent than a “death of postmodernism”… mostly because so shortly after, these ideas seem extremely dated by the various paranoia’s of that (thankfully) short epoch of slammed-shutter thought that litter the text.
I’m not doubting for a moment that there was a brief several-year time-period post 9/11 when we put on the intellectual brakes to focus on the “real”… and Kirby’s article strikes me as a final spasm of that method of thinking. But I feel that that era is over, and artists and critics have seemed to resume progressive/ abstract thinking where the word “real” once again REQUIRES those quotation-marks (as I was attempting to demonstrate with my post on Lady GaGa that inspired this analysis), once again WITHIN the postmodern mindset, rather than in opposition to it, utilizing and toying with the observations that Kirby makes, rather than allowing themselves to be trampled by them into cultural submission.
To be fair, Kirby himself leaves space in his text for the possibility of this transition. “Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can adopt them for meaningful artistic expression (and then the pejorative label I have given pseudo-modernism may no longer be appropriate), for now we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing almost nothing of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value.” Most present-tense observers tapped into any sort of network of creative thinkers would, I feel, be able to assert in mid-2009 that the “for now” that he refers to here was merely a nasty bout of societal growing-pains which are finally starting to pass. So then would have to be passing the “pseudo-modern” era that Kirby refers to, by his own admission that the term would in this case nullify itself by its own definition. Kirby’s “pseudo-modernism” was intended as a full-stop in the present-tense progress of ideas, but he left open the possibility for it to merge into something more like a semi-colon… with a bit of time, even that device of pause has softened into a set of brackets containing an independent clause, after which we must return to the sentence, the advancement of critical thought, already in progress before this anecdotal interruption.
Each movement is noted by its counterpoint to its predecessor, right? Then Postmodernism (as an always-admittedly loosely-defined and ambiguous phenomenon, as most “movements” are, most particularly in the present-tense) is most easily defined and grappled with in reference to Modernism. Many attribute-lists and sets of comparative points have been critically assembled… to return to Hassan, for instance, and swipe a few examples off of his diagram of this sort, Modernism is represented by “Form (conjunctive, closed)” as Postmodernism by “Antiform (disjunctive, open),” M. by “Purpose” to P.M.’s “Play,” M. by “Design” to P.M.’s “Chance,” “Art Object/ Finished Work” to “Process/ Performance/ Happening,” “Interpretation/ Reading” to “Against Interpretation/ Misreading,” “Genital/ Phallic” to “Polymorphous/ Androgynous,” “God the Father” to “The Holy Ghost,” Modernism’s “Metaphysics” to PostMod’s “Irony,” and, of course, the ever-confusing yet oft-quoted standby, “Signified” vs. “Signifier.”
Contrasting these counterpoints, and then re-observing Kirby’s observations and assertions, it seems to me that nearly all of Hassan’s characteristic examples on the Postmodern side of the chart sound an AWFUL lot like most of the very characteristics that Kirby is citing as the reasons that Postmod is dead and buried. By Hassan’s definitions, therefore, it seems that what Kirby calls the “pseudo-modern” is merely a facet and development of postmodernism, merely one that Kirby (and perhaps much of the culture at the time of his writing) hadn’t quite figured out how to constructively adjust to yet.
Maybe it’s because my vantage-point sits too close to the line Kirby draws in the sand as a “generation gap” (1980). Maybe my age-bracket, those of us right on the cusp of this transition, whose outlooks feature bits and pieces of BOTH generations and can often rationalize aspects of BOTH of the philosophies that he lays out (without contradicting ourselves any more than his own essay does), that I have a hard time viewing his assessments of the way that our contemporary culture has developed as the philosophy-shattering end-game that Kirby sees it as. Who knows. But whether or not Kirby’s stance was pertinent in 2006 or not, between the far more “contemporary” pivotal post-modern texts that he conveniently overlooked in his claim that these are the thoughts of our parents’ generation, his “good-old-days” lamenting about how short “the kids’” attention-span is these days, his assumptions that if corporate pop-media isn’t producing viable thought-products than neither is anyone else, etc, in 2009 I definitely don’t buy it.
“You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author;’ there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.”
These last lines of Kirby’s article strike me as humorously RIFE with exactly the sort of post-modern “elusiveness of meaning and knowledge,” “ironic self-awareness,” and “disbelief in grand narratives” that are the same phenomena he’s attempting to say that we no longer participate in.
Maybe Kirby’s text ITSELF is intended as an ironic post-modern meta-text, a game of subversive idea-play INTENDED to undo itself? If so, “The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond” would have made Beckett, Borges, and Nabokov EXTREMELY proud.
(Whew. Ok… I would like to thank IMMENSELY any of you that made it all the way through that one. If you did, you deserve a cookie. By “cookie,” I mean a brand new Swords We Swallow video. Thanks for reading… Enjoy.)
In a comment to my last entry, C. Charles ("xian") Dyer left a link to this fascinating article. Thank you, Mr. Dyer.
It's by Dr. Alan Kirby, from a 2006 issue of Philosophy Now magazine. Dr. Kirby asserted that post-modernism is dead, and that the way that contemporary pop-culture, technology, commerce, and social-dynamics operate have made any thought that goes beyond observational/ critical realism outdated and irrelevant.
I'm well aware that this article is 3 years outdated. But, it's new to me... and now that I'm familiar with Kirby's idea of "pseudo-modernism," three-years-out seems like a pretty good juncture to take a look and assess his predictions, especially since many of his claims are intrinsic upon the idea of how rapidly-changing, ephemeral and transient our culture has become.
For more on this debate on "what comes after post-modernity," I've actually found that (surprisingly) the Wikipedia entry for "post-postmodernism" actually provides a helpful overview (Dr. Kirby's article and nomenclature is mentioned here as well.) I've personally been partial to the ideas of "reconstructionism" for some time, but I tend to view this as an extension and development of postmodern thought, rather than a replacement of or rebuttal to it.
Since my next entry will feature my own response, reaction, and reflection on Dr. Kirby's article, I figured that I should probably post the link before-hand so that anyone who wants to know what I'm talking about can get a jump-start on reading it.
Overall, it's a really interesting read... I understand and agree with many of Dr. Kirby's observations, but I have some definite questions and reservations about the conclusions that he draws from them. (As I scribble all over the copy that I printed out, I'm also starting to get the impression that his own line of reasoning invalidates and contradicts some of the points that he's making [not to mention the fact that anyone's reading it]... but don't we all sometimes.)
When we speak of post-modern art, it is commonly understood that elements of pop-culture play an important role. What this role typically involves when we say this is that artists (who are typically functioning (or attempting to function) in certain ways OUTSIDE of the pop-culture, utilize elements of mainstream cultural trends within their work, as components of the pastiche that they employ. Think of pop-culture as a shade of fluorescent paint, not the painting itself that the pigment is utilized to make.
As my girlfriend was recently reading elements to me of the Wikipedia bio for the current ironic pop-princess Lady GaGa, it struck me that a bit of role-reversal within these conventions may be finally coming into play. From what I can piece together from the wiki and some further digging into similar info available on the internet, here’s a brief synopsis, and my analysis of how and why it works-
“Lady GaGa,” A.K.A. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, is first-and-foremost an Artist (and not in the same way that we might off-handedly refer to Britney Spears as a “recording-artist,” rather in the “Fine Art”/ “Conceptual Project” sort of way) She’s trained at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and maintains a “collective” (“Haus of GaGa”- of which she claims “this is my own creative team, modeled on Warhol's Factory. Everyone is under 26 and we do everything together.”) This is decidedly NOT the resume of someone who (like most of her peers) signed themselves away to a talent-agent with a hysterical (and hysterically naive) cry of “Whatever it takes to make me a staaaaar!”
In her own words, rather; "I consider what I do to be more of an Andy Warhol concept: pop performance art, multimedia, fashion, technology, video, film. And it's all coming together, and it's going to be traveling museum show."
The nearest I can gather, “Lady GaGa’s” current public persona was created as a performance-art stunt. She seems to have taken the current media-driven pop-music market as her canvas, and decided that on it she would paint a construction of herself, an intentionally fabricated pop-star.
Let’s face it. They’re ALL fabricated. That’s part of the deal; the entirety of what currently “sells” in that realm. It’s about time that an Artist stepped up and made themself and their identity into the canvas itself, dedicated themself to creating their own identity into a “pop-star” in order to achieve, in a more extreme and all-encompassing way, the points that nearly all dedicated post-modernists, “pop-artists,” and post-post-modernists are intending to make about the world that we live in and the fleeting natures of “truth” and “reality,” by merely referencing or lifting elements of pop-culture, rather than diving right in, as Lady GaGa has.
Pop-culture is no longer merely a shade of paint dabbed on for effect or to make a point. Pop-culture IS the point, but the post-modern point remains the same. The identity is still the canvas, the artist becomes that canvas, the paint is both the artist and pop-culture itself. Lady GaGa seems on a crash course to prove that artists can BECOME the very thing that they’re critiquing (without devolving completely to satire), and this may prove to be the most extreme and compelling way of making this point to date.
That is, if anyone bothers to take notice that, regardless of the surface-level similarities, there’s something decisively DIFFERENT between Lady GaGa and Christina Aguilera.
The concept of Samuel Beckett’s Nohow On begins at a juncture where the author already takes for granted that conventional literary forms have been torn down and rendered unnecessary. He is writing from a post-modern platform that is post-character, post-plot, and post-setting. Even when these elements can not be (or are not needed to be) completely removed, they are relied on as tools rather than as story-building focal-points themselves, as they would have necessarily been in literary moments prior to the one in which Beckett writes. He writes with the confidence that the efforts to tear down these problematic paradigms of the past has already been completed (by both critics and artists such as Borges), making it now his responsibility with this work to reconstruct just as admittedly fallible paradigms in the places where the old ones have been removed. The intention of the three “stories” in Nohow On, therefore, seem to be the construction of an elaborate simulacrum of both “literary form” and “reality” at the same time in the absence that the removal of prior forms of each have left. If it is understood from the point at which Beckett stands at the beginning of the work that “realities” are constructs of representations such as “literary form,” and these representative tools are also themselves constructs, and any prior assumptions of “truths” imbedded in either sides of these representative paradigms are therefore inconsequential, then Nohow On situates itself as a work that constructs new structures where the old ones have been stripped away, with the assumed understanding that the new forms are no more “real” than the ones that they replace.
The first “story” in the work, “Company,” presents an interesting corollary metaphor for the way that Beckett’s reconstruction in the entire work operates. Without giving the reader any more than elusive and extremely slight fragments of plot and setting, and only one extremely undeveloped shell of a character that we are told, in the last line of the work, has been the entire time “alone,” Beckett creates a story-telling format that operates with different necessary elements than these, while at the same time, by way of tools of language that rely on very different constructs, builds hypothetical “tangibles” by using the same sort of elusive and unsecured language. Within this tale, these tangibles are referred to as “company,” characters that are mere figures of language to keep the protagonist from being alone. These creations are built by way of language itself, which, by continually altering viewpoints, constructs a cacophony of voices, members of the “company,” that are no less yet definitely not more closely aligned to traditional “characters” than the one that we are told is alone.
Rather than utilize metafiction as merely an element of the storytelling convention, in “Company” metafiction is among the primary premises of the work, and in this way the piece is allegorical for Beckett’s reconstructionist ideology with Nohow On as a whole. The single “character” is, through language, “devising it all for company” (44). In order to not be alone, he creates, by way of narrative position and tense alterations, multiple voices that create one another. When he creates one, that one will spin off and change the position from which it speaks, thus constructing “yet another still devising it all for company” (44). The voices are the representation of characters; these representations create other representations. Thus, as the need for originals of characters to be represented becomes stripped away, we find that all are merely representations of representations, which, according to conventional story-telling guidelines, would render them to be nothing at all. Beckett, however, demonstrates actively how they are created, and therefore demonstrates that, because we are taking for granted now that conventional characterization is also merely representations of representations and therefore subjective or inconsequential, that the constructs themselves, built on nothing besides their nature as constructs, are the goal of the narration, and by their very constructed nature are viable entities, or at least as viable (or as nonviable) as any other representation. In this way, Beckett demonstrates how he will construct viability for all three of the stories in Nohow On, and demonstrates the point of the work to be the reconstruction of artificial representations that are as close to being as unhindered by “truthful” representations as the author can muster. Just as the “character” in “Company” lays on his minimalist bed and constructs a room full of voices, so Beckett stands on the blank slate of the post-modern critical understanding and constructs, with newly reutilized linguistic tools, his own form of representative story-telling.
Thus, as Borges demonstrates with his mirrors, and countless critics such as Baudrillard demonstrate with their theories of the postmodern, that all concepts of “reality” are representations that have little or no secure foundation, Beckett stands on this footing, in the chasm where the constructs have been torn down and takes the next step. He creates, just as the lone “character” in “Company” creates with language the voices of others to share the room with him, a new fallible reality to fill the gap that has been recently vacated, using as few as possible of the old tools, to rather start a new, and reconstruct false objects for the sake of the objects and their fallacy themselves.
The frequent question to be asked from this point, of course, is, if all representations are faulty because the represented itself and the act of representation are inherently faulty, where do we go from there? How can questions be answered if both the answer and the questions asked are inherently irrelevant? Many critics seem to have either wanted to stop here, as Derrida, or continue from a different juncture within the old structures entirely, like Jameson. If the same thought-process were to be maintained, however, the necessary next step from the point of tearing down prior “truths” would entail the reconstruction of new Art-based structures within the new-found understanding. Where critics seem to have been rare in asserting the necessity of this step and advocating for it, Artists themselves have taken up the pursuit, and constructed representational worlds based on assumptions that have become understood in the time since Borges’ work on the subject. The later work of Samuel Beckett provides a near-perfect example of the sort of reconstruction required to complete the postmodern project in relation to the problem of representation.
In Brian McHale’s essay “From Modernist to Postmodernist Fiction: Change of Dominant,” we are told that “the referent of ‘postmodernism,’ the thing to which the term claims to refer, does not exist. (4) Thus, the term is a construct, by the nature of its existence as a linguistic symbol with which to categorize or create, at the same time that the movement, style, or body of work (depending on which context the word is used in) that it is constructed in order to describe, its “referent,” as McHale calls it, is a construct as well. The term is a reflection of the ideas that it is created to describe, but neither the reflection or the source are any more “real” than the other. The categorical term can thus be seen as a mirror, where the representative reflection is limited and altered by the angle from which it is looked into and the confines of its frame. Therefore, since both the room that the mirror reflects and the mirror itself and the descriptive reflection are fabrications (as the mirror reflects things that are not themselves “real”) it is irrelevant to be concerned with the bias or credibility of the reflection, or its nature that lacks credibility as (or by the way of being) “merely” a reflection.
This image of representational reflection operates on several levels in dialogue about postmodernism. As McHale suggests, it applies to the movement’s nomenclature, with “postmodernism” the word serving as a mirror to reflect the room of “postmodernism” the thing. This image also applies to, more generally, the project of postmodernism in relation to conceptions of reality and representation. The mirror in this case is the text, art-form, or chosen form of representation in general, while the room is the world or setting being described, the “reality” being called into question. In this regard, McHale’s essay is in and of itself a postmodern text, merely using the linguistic representation of the movement itself as an example of the way that the postmodern conception of “reality” operates, most specifically its relative representational nature and eventual inevitable irrelevance.
Viewing postmodern representation as a mirror with reflection and subject, the subject itself being a reflection, provides an interesting correlation to Plato’s classic principle of Ideas versus Forms. The mirror provides the “Forms,” the representations, descriptions, and approximations, while the room that is reflected serves as the “Ideas” that, to Plato, are the “real” versions that the mirror reflects. Obviously, the wrench that postmodernism throws into Plato’s philosophy is that, when the ideas themselves are observed to be just as representational as the representations of them reflected in the mirror, the idea that the forms are subordinate to a more relevant set of ideas is torn down, leveling the playing-field and making the allegory of the cave appear more like a hall of mirrors with no definable source for the image, but rather a potentially endless series of reflections.
It is therefore no surprise that the mirror is a common symbol in postmodern works by authors such as Jorge Luis Borges. In Borges’ fiction, the mirror is most often placed in a room with fabricated “realistic” parameters. The room is constructed in such a way that it shares enough commonality with the “realities” understood by the readership that it serves as one layer of reflection, while the mirror is placed in order to reflect this reflection, to draw our attention to the limitless number of layers of possible potential-“realities” that can be caused by representing alternate representations, which, to the postmodernist, is the task that all artists are engaged in. The room is a representation, intentionally altered (or perhaps merely biased by the chosen angle of perception), of the “reality” that Borges understands, which is, in itself, a representation in several regards (perception, perspective, linguistic, etcetera), and the mirror provides a third layer of representation, which can be altered by the angle that it is perceived from, the angle that the light is received by it from, the limiting confines (bias) of the boundaries of its frame, etcetera. By way of the inclusion of this third layer of reflection, we are reminded of the representational biases and alterations of all other layers of reflection that led to this version of the image. The third visible layer of reflection directs the reader’s eye to the idea that the images’ sources are ambiguous, and possibly non-existent. Because it is understood that neither the reflection in the mirror or the image of the room that it reflects are “real,” neither the reflection nor the image are more or less relevant than the other, and biases, limitations, and angles of perception no longer have any effect on the readers’ perception of the “truthfulness” or “credibility.” By the same reasoning, therefore, as all layers of what we perceive as “reality” are subjective representations, Borges is using the mirror to demonstrate how the worlds that he creates in his stories are no less relevant or “real” than the ones that he or his reader lives in; Uqbar is no less relevant than Europe, Bioy is no less relevant than the reader, the author’s speculation about the room that the reader sits in no less relevant than the room that the reader himself perceives from his own sensory biases.
The mirror is thrust in the reader’s face on the very first page of Borges’ short-story collection, “Labyrinths.” The first tale in the book, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” begins with a description of how a mirror (or, more specifically, a conversation about the conceptual value of the reflective properties of a mirror, in some ways much like this one) aids in the discovery of a fictitious world. The number of levels of “fictive” representation referenced by this symbol are nearly limitless, and staggering. Conceptually, this number is allowed to be so astoundingly infinite by the reflective nature of the mirror itself. The mirror’s ability to reflect (and an assumption that what it creates is “real,” as the heresiarch of Uqbar tells us that “mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of men” [Borges 3]) is contemplated in an encyclopedia entry (a reflection/ representation) about a fictitious place (another reflection) created by fictitious characters as a sort of an experiment with the nature of representation (reflection), which is discovered by another set of fictional characters, who reside in the principle “reality” of the piece, which is a reflection of the “reality” that Borges assumes for his readers, which is a reflection of his own “reality,” which only he can represent with whatever sort of biases or angles that he chooses and is the product of the representation of his sensory, linguistic, and cultural perceptions, among other things (all of which are reflections or subjective representations). The mirror offers no way of identifying the source of the reflections, demonstrating the truth of the comment by the “fictitious” heresiarch of Uqbar that the men reflected in the mirror are just as “real” as the men that they reflect, thus suggesting that the heresiarch, although separated by at least four layers of reflection, is no less “real” or “credible” of a relater of information or “truth” than Borges himself is. By this mirror, therefore, Borges demonstrates the postmodern project (and the meaning of the term and artistic movement itself) that he seems to agree with McHale on, that “the referent… the thing to which the term claims to refer, does not exist.” Contrary to the beliefs of Plato, postmodernism asserts that there is no difference between Ideas and Forms, the reflection is not less “real” than the reflected.
I have taken a bit of a break from my online postings lately, due to the time-constraints imposed by the grad-school application process. I apologize.
To my avid and disapointed readers (*cough*), I apologize.
To tide you over in the meantime, this evening I will begin to post segments of a piece of essay-work that I am currently working on retyping and reformatting for a professor.
This is the first installment in a series, and thus a cliff-hanger; so keep posted.
Mirrors and Voices; Borges’ and Beckett’s Collective Postmodern Project of Tearing Down and Rebuilding Representations.
Refining the Scope of the Project
To encapsulate a major theme of the Postmodern project, it has been the job of both artists and critics to tear down all that had existed before, particularly as it relates to the idea of representation, and rebuild admittedly false but just-as-plausible representational constructs in the place where structures that were held as “truth” in the modernist and pre-modern eras had been removed. In this regard, critically, far more work has been done in the earlier phase of this project; that of the removing of past assumptions of representational “truth,” than in the latter stage, the process of rebuilding where the first stage leaves enormous opportunity for new Art-for-Art’s-sake initiatives. In terms of the works of Art that participate in the project, however, effort has definitely been made on all sides of the task. In this regard, Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett represent opposite ends of this spectrum that compliment each other nicely in view of the combined project of the movement. Borges can be seen to represent the beginning of the postmodern process in this regard, the early process of tearing down, by way of the works of art themselves, the constructs of the previously assumed “truths.” Correspondingly, Beckett represents the end goal of the project, the reconstruction, by way of Art itself, of new constructs based on the assumption that the old ones, by this point, are understood to be irrelevant (these new constructs would, therefore, also be irrelevant in any regard but to the advancement of the Art of representation itself). The two authors, therefore, if taken collectively, represent, in many ways, the fulfillment of the postmodern task. Deconstruction is inconsequential if some form of Reconstruction doesn’t follow, and true artistic construction cannot take place without the tabula rasa that early post-modern truth-destruction (both critical and artistic) provides. Borges and Beckett allow us to view how the two can most successfully function together to achieve a coherent artistic (and inherently Art-focused) statement.
I’m seriously considering having book-plates printed. Something with my name and a distinct design to slap inside the cover of books that I’ve completed reading and adorned with my scribbles. Some sort of insignia to claim authorship for my notes, to take credit for my marginalia. If my literary career-path proceeds as planned, this sort of thing may seem some day relevant.
I have just set down a hard-cover copy of a seminal masterpiece that all educated students of Literature are often assumed to have a working knowledge of. Most seem to claim to, and nearly all have read segments. As I pored through the work, however, I wondered more with every page how many of the members of the Literatcia that claim to have read or understood the book had actually completed reading it.
Flipping through the physical pages of the book, which still sit stinging a bit from the abuses that I administered upon them, I can’t help noticing that my scribbles say as much about me and the place that I was personally at while writing them as they do about the printed text that contains them and was intended as their subject and inspiration. This seems, of course, in predictable posture for a critic writing in a post- Post-Modern era about a pivotal work of High Modernism. What is probably less predictable is how much I see in common between the ground that Joyce stood on and the ground to which critical thought has proceeded and, more importantly, could presently proceed further to. It seems almost fitting, for example, in regards to both the potentials of future scholarship and the critical ideology of the work in question that, rather than write another book about the book and fill it with one authors ideas about another authors ideas (which, don‘t get me wrong, is an interesting idea that definitely has its place), that a critic’s scribbles, notes, and thoughts in the margins of the original work might be reprinted and published in such a form, so that the readers of each (ideally the same reader) might be able to actively witness how the two works (and two authors) interact with one another.
The white-space at the end of the book proved a welcome silence after the book’s ending, a forty-four page marathon unpunctuated mental rant by a woman that I, at many points, wished to scream at to shut the hell up. In this gap, while still possessed by the post-traumatic headache that I feel fairly certain was much of Joyce’s intention at the end of the work, I jotted the following words-
“A reaffirmation, continuation of a destructive, yet affirmative cycle. Devotion comes in strange forms. Identities are constructed out of conflict/ conflicting conceptions.”
If you’re among what I’m guessing to be a small minority that has actually finished the book, you might know what I mean and to what it refers. Then again, you still might not. After all, my notes, and my personal understanding of the text, has as much, if not more, to do with me than it does with anyone named Bloom, Dedalus, or Joyce.
I’m open to suggestions as to what to print on my book-plates.
