The Popularity of Postmodernism

Author(s): Hillary Chute

Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 57, No. 3/4, Postmodernism, Then (Fall/Winter
2011), pp. 354-363
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41698755
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 HI
The Popularity of Postmodernism

Hillary Chute

T-L-Lhe commonplaces about postmodernism are themselves burdensome

commonplaces. They evacuate nuance and historical understanding, and
to notice their performance in spheres both popular and academic is to
cringe. (The "there is no truth" line is a prime example; other examples
include the equation of "postmodernism" with intensive "irony," as if
irony didn't exist until the twentieth-century. Then there is the converse,
which is the casual, unelaborated bashing of terms like "humanism" - or
even "totality" - seen to be postmodernism s opposite.)1 If postmodern-
isms urgency as a category of analysis - as a condition (Jameson), or as
a poetics (Hutcheon) - no longer carries the same relevance it did even
ten years ago, then specificity, a modicum of precision, is yet enormously
important, even if describing, as Bill Brown points out, a cultural logic
"that evacuates or eradicates essence" (736). Looking through PMLA -
which is, after all, the official organ of our field - I discovered only three
essays published with the words "postmodernism," "postmodernity," or
"postmodern" in their titles since the turn of the twenty-first century:
two in 2005, one in 2007. The shift this thinness represents (compared
to seven essays overall in the period from 1989-1999) is typical of a shift
away from postmodernism as appellation , its apparatus as nomenclature.
This is a shift I can also track in my own work, which is about a subject
many take as transparently "postmodern" - comics. (The form of com-
ics is, broadly speaking, obviously relevant to postmodernism in that it
is, unlike, say, the novel, itself an approximately twentieth-century form,
and an inherently self-reflexive one that mixes high and mass modes.)2
Yet if "postmodernism" dropped out of my primary critical vocabulary,
central concepts and hermeneutics it sponsors or opens up, especially
for exploring contemporary forms like comics, remain indispensable.

Twentieth-Century Literature 57.3 & 57.4 Fall/Winter 2011 354

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The Popularity of Postmodernism

What remains after anxieties about and even interest in taxonomy shed
themselves? What is not exhausted even if we are not heralding it as
"postmodernism" anymore?
I was keenly interested in postmodernism in graduate school. I began
graduate study in 1999, year of the millennial panic and The Matrix ; one
year before the traumatizing 2000 national election and two years before
9/11. All of my favorite courses had "postmodernism" in their titles. There
was - from three different professors - "The 60s and Postmodernism,"
"Postmodern/Postsecular," and "Postmodern Theater and Performance."
These courses shaped my thinking profoundly (then and to this day) . In
my Twentieth-Century Interest Group, of which I was the nominal orga-
nizer, we read and debated College English's "Twentieth-Century Literature
in the New Century" (2001) - a special issue explicitly motivated by the
matter of the usefulness of and connections between the categories "mod-
ern" and "postmodern."3 When Orals came around, my methodology
list, on feminist theory, had a subsection on "Postmodern Locations" that
included works such as "Postmodern Blackness" (bell hooks), "Feminism
and Postmodernism: In Lieu of an Ending" (Susan Suleiman), "The Dis-
course of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism" (Craig Owens), books
like Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (Rita Felski), and
critical volumes such as Feminism /Postmodernism (ed. Linda Nicholson),
which operated like a bible for me. My dissertation was heavily engaged
with postmodernism, manifest in deep critical engagements with Linda
Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson, among other famous articulators of
postmodernism. It was about innovative narrative forms whose subject is
history - specifically, it is about the possibilities of the medium of com-
ics in this area - and I remember thinking, ashamedly, to myself about
Hutcheon s A Poetics of Postmodernism: History ; Theory ; Fiction (1988), that I
wished my dissertation could simply argue that contemporary comics are
"historiographie metafiction," Hutcheon s compelling assessment of what
constitutes the poetics of postmodernism. (Why hadn't she included a
text like Art Spiegelman s Maus along with her analyses of J. M. Coetzee s
Foe and Salman Rushdie s Midnighťs Children , I wondered with honest
surprise).4 My adviser, with consummate politeness, told me I was being
too "dutiful." I struggled to reduce the number of footnotes referring to
A Poetics of Postmodernism.
But when my first book came out, four years later, the word "post-
modern" appears in an actual sentence of mine only once. (Discussing

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Hillary Chute

a Lynda Barry book, I noted it is "a print reproduction of an artists' book,

a specifically populist, postmodernist rendering of that form" ( Graphic
Women 112). It appears once further, in a quotation, and only twice,
briefly, in the footnotes of the 297-page study.) And I wasn't even trying
to avoid it. Its elision had been seamless. What happened? I never thought
in a million years I would write a book based on my dissertation that has
no index entry for "postmodernism" and does have one for "fellatio."
It's not only that I became a better critic in the four years. The
twenty-first-century shift in my lexicon is not atypical. As an identifying,
naming category, designating loosely grouped aesthetic and cultural move-
ments, enabled by "late capitalism" (if you will), postmodernism has lost
its critical urgency.5 And to enumerate how something is postmodern or
postmodernist, as I had the urge to do, is no longer possible as a relevant
critical insight. (Realizing this is like the moment a professor tells you
that concluding a text is "subversive" can never be your takeaway. It can
maybe be in your first paragraph.) It could be the first step, or an implicit
aspect of an argument, as it wound up being in my Graphic Women: Life
Narrative and Contemporary Comics. However, this reduction in taxonomie
urgencies signals the success of postmodernism (as a logic, ethic, move-
ment). Postmodernism has expanded the range of objects of analysis, and
the way we talk about them, so successfully that it has enacted its own
critical disappearance. But is what I study not postmodernism? No. I'll
point out briefly how postmodernism has shaped what I study - and how
I study it - profoundly.

Comics and postmodernism

Largely, my scholarship has explored the medium of comics, a narrative
word-and-image form that often identifies itself as modernist, but which
is, rather - at least in its contemporary flourishing, an expansion and cre-
ation of new literary spaces - deeply enabled by postmodernism. (Stylisti-
cally, it is my view that literary modernism and postmodernism are very
similar.) In cartoonist Art Spiegelman s "Afterword" to his Breakdowns , a
1978 small-press anthology republished by Pantheon in 2008, Spiegelman
writes, referring to composing the work collected in the book during the
era of the comics underground: "He was on fire, alienated and ignored,
but arrogantly certain that his book would be a central artifact in the
history of Modernism" (n. pag).6 Comics, however anachronistically, had

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The Popularity of Postmodernism

its high modernist phase in the 1960s and '70s - the era of R. Crumbs
"Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comix" (1968) and
Spiegelman s densely anti-narrative Breakdowns pieces. "It did feel like
this must have been what the cubists were going through," Spiegelman
remarks. "All the magic of being in Paris for the post-Impressionist mo-
ment did feel somehow like being in San Francisco in the early 1970s"
(qtd. in Rosenkranz 4). Stylistically and formally, comics were modernist.
Underground comics were self-consciously, explicitly "avant-garde"
in their approach to narrative possibility, pushing on temporal and spatial
constraints of comics form. In the underground, the form was refigured
as experimental, in the sense of deliberately and productively obstructing
"normal reading." But even during this re-shaping as avant-garde (from
the realm of the putatively childish) comics self-consciously aimed to
address itself to the largest possible number of readers; it nevertheless
recognized itself as a mass media form, and in this way itself furthered
and helped to define the "egalitarian mixing" that is now such a recog-
nizable feature of aesthetic and cultural postmodernism (DeKoven 17).
Cartoonist Justin Green, the creator of what is widely considered the first
autobiographical comic, the 44-page Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin
Mary ; which directly laid the groundwork for today s serious book-length
work, comments, "[We] all held to the ideal of reaching a common audi-
ence while reinventing the formal boundaries that defined the medium. Like any
Utopian experiment, ideals were challenged and rewritten in the face of
the daily grind" (Rosenkranz 4, italics mine). Not coincidentally, Binky
was published in 1972, a year that many attach to the beginning of post-
modernism.7
Green s statement highlights the features I argue define the propensi-
ties of the comics medium in, actually, all of its various generic twentieth-
century manifestations (as early newspaper comic strips, mid-century
comic books, '60s-era "comix," and graphic novels, whose rise from the
'70s onward is confluent with historical postmodernism): an awareness
and appreciation of comics as a reproducible mass medium, combined
with an oppositional, political, rigorous attention to form and experi-
mentation. This productive contradiction is, for me, the defining feature
of comics. And it is one that postmodernism s critical ethic makes intel-
ligible. This tension existed before historical postmodernism (whether one
dates a beginning to the late '50s, '60s, or early '70s), but postmodernism's
lexicon helps articulate it. Further, the context of postmodernism allowed

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Hillary Chute

comics to flourish, and vice versa, directly shaping today s expanded field
of"the literary." Indeed, that Justice Antonin Scalia, in his majority opin-
ion in the June 27, 2011 decision on violence and video games, identified
their "literary devices" and even referred to video games as a "medium"
is a sign of the democratic expanding of categories within the fold of the
literary. Today this contradiction has generated a reorientation toward
new modalities and forms of the popular accomplished (slowly, and over
time) by the logic and poetics of postmodernism. Without this, we would
not have the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century comics field that
is thriving, happily and conspicuously, in all sorts of differently marked
spaces, elite and popular and in between. (It is worth noting, though,
how anxiety about "high/low" dichotomies still endures apart from the
modernism-postmodernism axis. For instance, my PMLA essay "Com-
ics as Literature?" was accused of re-inscribing a high/low divide within
comics studies because it analyzed single-author, non-genre comics texts.
Rifts, especially methodological ones, can persist within subject areas that
themselves have become widely accepted.)8
To this reader, there is little formal difference, as will have been clear
by now, between the stylistic features of modernism and postmodernism.
The key difference, and this is not something to take lightly, is in the
refiguration of the "popular," a heterogeneity of aesthetic and cultural
practices, what Marianne DeKoven identifies in Utopia Limited as the
"free mixing of previously distinct modes of cultural practice and form,"
in which "popular culture, vehicle and expression of postmodern egali-
tarianism, is no longer meaningfully distinct from either high culture or
from consumer culture" (17). Comics may have features of high visual and
literary modernism, yet the crucial difference with comics is that it resides
in the field of the popular.9 As such, deeply experimental comics - even
ones that name themselves "avant-garde" - are less truly "avant-garde"
than they are "postmodern."
Comics is, further, a literary location in which we notice the critical
importance of postmodernism s emphasis on space.10 Comics is often said
to be a form that "turns time into space." Its grammar is composed of
panels, drawn, that are meant to represent punctual moments - or, "boxes
of time," as Spiegelman puts it - that exist in meaningful spatial relation-
ship to one another. Comics spatializes narrative on the page, juxtaposing
panels with the white space of the gutter. It is a site-specific form: unlike,
say, Ulysses, which can be set in various typefaces and trim sizes, comics

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The Popularity of Postmodernism

cannot be "re-flowed."11 Comics traffics heavily - mainly - in what I

think of as architected space; its pages are built. (And Spiegelman reminds
us that his favorite definition of "story" is from the Medieval Latin "his-
toria": a "row of windows with pictures on them") In David Mazzuc-
chelli s acclaimed 2009 graphic novel Asterios Polyp - which the Times,
incidentally, hailed as a work of modernism - the joke of the novel is that
the protagonist is a "paper architect," a term that refers to architects who
only create works on paper - which is to say, it is a highly self-reflexive
book about a cartoonist.

The few important articles that have been published in our field
the past few years on the broad subject of postmodernism remind us
that architecture is one of the key objects - and instantiations - of post-
modernism (say, for example, Browns "Dark Wood of Postmodernity ") .
Postmodernism has given us - in part through critical attention to archi-
tecture, directional orientation, and subjectivity - an emphatic awareness
of space as a perceptual modality. Comics, then, in the realm of the literary,
places the reader within the space of a narrative, amplifying postmodern-
ism s concern with location, boundaries, depth, and mapping. It returns
us, in the arena of literature, to a site of cultural production invested in
textuality and print that yet is premised on the spatial - in its construction
and in the act of meaning-making on the part of the looker and viewer.
If Joseph Frank called attention to spatial form in modern literature in his
classic 1945 essay of the same name, he was, in W.J. T. Mitchells words,
actually calling attention to a general experience of reading literature,
in any time period.12 But comics intensifies and makes conspicuously
necessary the spatial experience of literature; it is a form that is itself a
procedure of mapping (mapping time into space; providing orthogonal
views). Comics s narrative typology is a spatial architectonics. It keeps a
focus on architecture and cognition, but it is invested, on a fundamental
narrative level, in architecture of the page.
I may not have had "postmodernism" in my book index, but I did
have multiple entries for "cognitive mapping" - a term associated with
Jameson (who derives it from Kevin Lynch s The Image of the City). The
importance of a focus on mapping generally has made possible the flour-
ishing of a theoretical glossary - however in flux - for comics.13 (I might
also add that Jamesons focus on the cognitive in 1991 was prescient, as
the domain of the cognitive is practically, along with studies of affect,
the emergent or even now dominantly fashionable analytic in our field.)

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Hillary Chute

Without the sophisticated focus on space, evinced in the enduring power

of terms such as "cognitive mapping" and the entry into architecture
proposed to students of literature by postmodernism, the critical language
for comics wouldn't have had the chance to aerate the way it has; to find
proportionate and analogical possible critical and theoretical vocabularies.
The language of space and architecture comes from cartoonists them-
selves; it is not inherited from postmodernism s critical lexicon. (When
Todd Gitlin praised Maus as "trenchant postmodernism" in a 1988 essay
in the New York Times, Spiegelman told interviewer Andrea Juno he was
flattered but did not know what postmodernism was.) Yet I want to sug-
gest here that comics have helped postmodernism to expand the range of
its object of inquiry, and that the context of postmodernism has allowed
comics culture, particularly as it expands the rubric of "literature," to
flourish (could I be a professor of English who studies comics otherwise?).
I was searching recently through 2010 s Critical Terms for Media Stud-
ies - a collection that we can consider the fruition, in a sense, of postmod-
ernism. "Postmodernism" appears very few times in the book - the index
entry for the term has only a handful of references. Unsurprisingly, there
is no chapter heading for "Postmodernism" (as there was earlier for the
same series' Critical Terms for Art History), but there is one for "Time and
Space," which perhaps stands in for such. With its entries for "Biomedia,"
"Cybernetics," "New Media," "Hardware / Software /Wetware," "Net-
works," and "Systems," among others, this book could not have existed
without postmodernism. That the discourse has outgrown its name is a
sign of its efficacy.

Notes
1 . Of course, Fredric Jameson - one of the primary explicators of
postmodernism - defends "totality" as a concept. See The Political Unconscious :
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, in addition to Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism, among other of his texts.

2. In this way, if not formally, comics shares a certain positionality with film;
both developed as narrative forms around the turn of the nineteenth century
and ascended as mass media in the twentieth century.

3. That this issue is dated September 2001, but thus was surely composed

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The Popularity of Postmodernism

previously, is particularly interesting; would the issue look different a half a year
later? Some, such as Slavoj Zižek, have suggested that 9/11 was in some way an
ending for postmodernism (see Desert).

4. Later, Hutcheon did write about comics - specifically, Art Spiegelmans

Mans - in "Postmodern Provocation: History and 'Graphic' Literature," La Torre
4-5 (1997), which was published in a somewhat different form as "Literature
Meets History: Counter-Discursive 'Comix,'" in Anglia 117 (1999).

5. Further, even as I worked on my dissertation in the earlyish years of the

twenty- first century, the question of how to frame postmodernism had
already shifted away from its location in the previous decade's burning debates
(perhaps exemplified by the Alan Sokal /Social Text affair of 1996). As Marianne
DeKoven, writing in 2004 in her important study Utopia Limited: The Sixties
and the Emergence of the Postmodern , puts it, "I prefer to synthesize the useful
elements ... in order to produce a comprehensive, syncretic understanding of
the postmodern phenomenon rather than enter into the postmodernism debates
that are, moreover, no longer critically urgent, having peaked a decade ago " (10, italics
mine).

6. During the movement many called the "underground comix revolution,"

mainstream publication and distribution outlets were shunned in favor of self-
publishing, collectives, and the left-wing press.

7. McHale surveys different attempts to fix the beginning of postmodernism

in his "1966 Nervous Breakdown: or, When Did Postmodernism Begin?,"
one of very few recent articles of note addressing postmodernism as such. He
details the cases made for 1972, and 1973, focusing on architecture, literature,
and music, before arguing for 1966. DeKoven, as McHale notes, offers the
"responsible" account of the emergence of postmodernism in the "long
sixties," 1957-1973 (391).
8. See Saunders and Chute.

9. The bond between material form and visual performativity enacted on the
page, for instance, is evident in English Vorticism, Anglo-American modernism,
Futurism, and Dada, and, today, to name just one location, in contemporary
language poetry. See Drucker.

10. As Brown and others point out, space was also a focus in modernism, but
I agree with Susan Stanford Friedman's sense that the dominant rhetoric of
modernism may be temporal, while the dominant rhetoric of postmodernism,
riveted to boundary crossings and the like, is spatial.

1 1 . For more on "re-flow" see McCloud.

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Hillary Chute

12. "The burden of proof . . . is not on Frank to show that some works have
spatial form but on his critics to provide an example of any form that does
not" (Mitchell, from "Spatial Form in Literature").

13. "Cognitive mapping" as a productive rubric feels so basic to my thinking

that I was shocked to hear it described as a "canonical" concept at a conference
recently, as if it's a stodgy mainstay.

Works cited
Brown, Bill. "The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory)."
PMLA 120.3 (2005): 734-50.
Chute, Hillary. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New
York: Columbia UP, 2010.
College English. "Twentieth-Century Literature: A Symposium." Ed. Andrew
Hoberek, et al. National Council of Teachers of English 64.1 (2001). 9-33.
Crumb, R. "Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comix." Apex
Novelties: San Francisco, Zap #1, 1968.
DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the
Postmodern. Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
Drucker, Johanna. "Visual Performance of the Poetic Text." Close Listening :
Poetry and the Performed Word. Ed. Charles Bernstein. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1998: 131-61
Felksi, Rita. Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture , 2000.
Gitlin, Todd. "Hip Deep in Postmodernism." NewYork Times 6 Nov 1988. 1
July 2011.
Green, Justin. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. San Francisco: Last Gasp,
1972.

Hansen, Mark B. N., and W.J. T. Mitchell, eds. Critical Terms for Media Studies.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.
hooks, bell. "Postmodern Blackness." Postmo dem Culture 1.1 (1990). 1 March
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Hutcheon, Linda. "Literature Meets History: Counter-Discursive 'Comix,'"

Anglia 117 (1999): 5-14.

Routledge, 1988.

4-5 (1997) 299-308.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative
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UP, 1991.

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The Popularity of Postmodernism

Liptak, Adam. "Justices Reject Ban on Violent Video Games for Children." New
York Times Tl June 2010. 1 July 201 1.
Mazzucchelli, David. Asterios Polyp. New York: Pantheon, 2009.
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McHale, Brian. "1966 Nervous Breakdown, or, When Did Postmodernism
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Nicholson, Linda, ed. Feminism /Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1990.
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Spiegelman, Art. Breakdowns /Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!. New York:
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Suleiman, Susan. "Feminism and Postmodernism: In Lieu of an Ending."
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Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2003.

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