HIP-DEEP IN POST-MODERNISM

By TODD GITLIN; Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of ''The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage'' and editor of ''Watching Television,'' a collection of essays Published: November 06, 1988

Journals, conferences, galleries and coffeehouses are spilling over with talk about post-modernism. What is this thing, where does it come from, and what is at stake? If it is nothing more than chat to keep the cocktail parties humming, why the volume, why the heat? True, in literature as in art, fashion, architecture, etc., style always attracts interest. On matters of style careers turn and cease to turn; commentators and consumers alike ''position'' themselves to be a la mode. But what is striking in recent years is that elements of a post-modern style have attracted attention (and dismay) in field after field, genre after genre - so that it is reasonable to surmise that a general sensibility is among us. Clearly it cannot be explained by the esthetic problems and history of any particular art form. Postmodernism in the arts corresponds to post-modernism in life, as sketched by the French theorist JeanFrancois Lyotard: ''One litens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong.'' To argue about post-modernism, therefore, is to argue about more than post-modernism. Post-modernism is more than a buzzword or even an esthetic; it is a way of seeing, a view of the human spirit and an attitude toward political as well as cultural possibilities. It has precedents, but in its reach it is the creature of our recent social and political moment. In style, more than style is at stake. To get beyond vague talk and knowing genuflection, it is never a bad idea to start by deciding what we are talking about. We can get a rough fix on post-modernism by contrasting it to its main predecessors, realism and modernism. In the realism that rode high in the 19th century, the work of art was supposed to express unity and continuity. Realism mirrored reality, criticized it and consoled. The individuals portrayed were clearly placed in society and history. High culture was just that - higher, more valuable, than popular culture. In modernism, voices, perspectives and materials were multiple. The unity of the work was assembled from fragments and juxtapositions. Art set out to remake life. Audacious individual style threw off the dead hand of the past. Continuity was disrupted, the individual subject dislocated. High culture quoted from popular culture. Post-modernism, by contrast, is indifferent to consistency and continuity altogether. It selfconsciously splices genres, attitudes, styles. It relishes the blurring or juxtaposition of forms (fictionnonfiction), stances (straight-ironic), moods (violent-comic), cultural levels (high-low). It disdains originality and fancies copies, repetition, the recombination of hand-me-down scraps. It neither embraces nor criticizes, but beholds the world blankly, with a knowingness that dissolves feeling and commitment into irony. It pulls the rug out from under itself, displaying an acute self-consciousness about the work's constructed nature. It takes pleasure in the play of surfaces and derides the search for depth as mere nostalgia for an unmoved mover. It regards ''the individual'' as a sentimental

attachment, a fiction to be enclosed within quotation marks. ''The individual'' has decomposed, as ''reality'' has dissolved; nothing lives but ''discourses,'' ''texts,'' ''language games,'' ''images,'' ''simulations'' referring to other ''discourses'' ''texts,'' etc. ''Characters'' can step out of character; they can die, as in Philip Roth's novel ''The Counterlife,'' only to live again. High culture speaks the same language as popular culture, even blurs into it. One post-modernist trope is the list, as if culture were a garage sale, so it is appropriate to evoke post-modernism by offering a list of examples, for better and for worse: Michael Graves's Portland Building, Philip Johnson's AT&T, and hundreds of more or less skillful derivatives; Robert Rauschenberg's silk screens, Warhol's multiple-image paintings, photo-realism, Larry Rivers's erasures and pseudo-pageantry, Sherrie Levine's photographs of ''classic'' photographs; Disneyland, Las Vegas, suburban strips, shopping malls, mirror-glass office building facades; William Burroughs, Tom Wolfe, Donald Barthelme, Monty Python, Don DeLillo, Isuzu ''He's lying'' commercials, Philip Glass, ''Star Wars,'' Spalding Gray, David Hockney (''Surface is illusion, but so is depth''), Max Headroom, David Byrne, Twyla Tharp (choreographing Beach Boys and Frank Sinatra songs), Italo Calvino, ''The Gospel at Colonus,'' Robert Wilson, the Flying Karamazov Brothers, George Coates, the Kronos Quartet, Frederick Barthelme, MTV, ''Miami Vice,'' David Letterman, Laurie Anderson, Anselm Kiefer, John Ashbery, Paul Auster, the Pompidou Center, the Hyatt Regency, ''The White Hotel,'' E. L. Doctorow's ''Book of Daniel,'' ''Less Than Zero,'' Kathy Acker, Philip Roth's ''Counterlife'' (but not ''Portnoy's Complaint''), the epilogue to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's ''Berlin Alexanderplatz,'' the ''language poets''; the French theorists Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard; television morning shows; news commentary cluing us in to the imagemaking and ''positioning'' strategies of candidates; remote-control-equipped viewers ''grazing'' around the television dial. Consider also Australia's Circus Oz, whose jugglers comment on their juggling and crack political jokes in a program infused by (their list) ''Aboriginal influences, vaudeville, Chinese acrobatics, Japanese martial arts, fireman's balances, Indonesian instruments and rhythms, video, Middle Eastern tunes, B-grade detective movies, modern dance, Irish jigs, and the ubiquitous present of corporate marketing.'' Consider the student who walks into my office dressed in green jersey, orange skirt and black tights. There are important differences, of course. Donald Barthelme is wistful about the dignity of the premodernist tradition (''In the Tolstoy Museum''); Kathy Acker ransacks and trashes it. But whether disassembling or dissembling, post-modernists know that they, we, are living hip-deep in debris. So what's new? It has been argued that post-modernism is nothing more - or less - than the current phase of a modernist tradition (nice oxymoron!) already nearly a century old. True enough, for all the fanfare, post-modernism is, by definition, known by the company it follows. It is too modest (or is that only a ploy?) to pretend to be more than a sequel - which may be nothing more than an aftermath or a hiatus. Still, post-modernism peels away from its predecessor in several respects: its blase tone,

its sense of exhaustion, its self-conscious bemusement with surfaces. The question remains, whether brand new or a ''new improved'' modernism, just what does post-modernism express (and repress) at this historical moment? Why should this spirit have surfaced recently and why is it so anxiously debated? A phenomenon this sweeping cannot be traced to a single cause. In the recent debates, I detect six theories. They are not incompatible, but their emphases are different. Each contributes to an explanation; none is sufficient. * The Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, among others, has argued that post-modernism is an ideology well suited to express and further the global economic system that capitalism has become. Highconsumption capitalism requires a ceaseless transformation in style, a connoisseurship of surface, an emphasis on packaging and reproducibility: post-modernist art echoes the truth that the arts have become auxiliary to sales. In order to adapt, consumers are pried away from traditions, their selves become ''decentered,'' and a well-formed interior life becomes an obsolete encumbrance. Even ''life styles'' become commodities to be marketed. In effect, post-modernism expresses the spiritless spirit of a global class linked via borderless mass media with mass culture, omnivorous consumption and easy travel. Their experience denies the continuity of history; they live in a perpetual present garnished by nostalgia binges. Space is not real, only time. The post-modernist style makes sense to the new consumer. In the global shopping center (as Richard Barnet and Ronald Muller have called it), local traditions have been swamped by the workings of the market; anything can be bought, and to speak of intrinsic value is mere sentimentality. Post-modernist literature cultivates place names in the same way consumers flock to the latest cuisine: in the spirit of the collector, because the uniqueness of real places is actually waning. It makes much of brand names (even ironically) because they have become the furnishings of our cultural ''home.'' How else to represent this new world than through post-modernist flatness? The post-modernist motto is: You can't beat trash culture, so join it. The trouble is, this sweeping, impressive argument, once carved out from beneath the murk, is too sweeping. Aiming to explain so much, it glides over actual artists and the relation between specific experience and artistic choices. Moreover, the economic changes have been at work for 50 or 75 years; then why are their artistic consequences showing up only now? * Perhaps, it has been argued, scientific reason is the corrosive force that has eroded the authority of narrative style and especially of the grand ''metanarratives'' (the Enlightenment, capitalism, Marxism, etc.) that purported to justify not only philosophical but artistic claims to have rendered things as they are. Quantum theory and microphysics have undermined certainty and continuity. Voila, postmodernism, which enshrines the discontinuous and ''reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.'' Something like this has been argued by the theorist Lyotard (''The Postmodern Condition''), whose slapdash style, in the French mode, is to insist rather than to argue. But the

argument, if I understand it, is clumsy: the impact of science has been accelerating for centuries, yet the post-modernist style is no more than two decades old. * More concretely and modestly, the critic Cecelia Tichi argues that post-modern fiction - at least the work of Ann Beattie, Bret Easton Ellis, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tama Janowitz, among others - is ''video fiction.'' Anesthetized writing recreates the experience of watching television to the saturation point, taking it for granted. Attention span shriveled, a new generation of fictionists writes in televisionese. They write in the present tense because that is television's only tense: everything is always happening right now, in the middle; there are no beginnings or ends. Growing up on fragmented television, to which they gave their fragmented attention, these writers produce ''short scenes juxtaposed almost at random.'' Their characters live inconclusively, ''forever poised for action rather than engaged in it,'' because that is what television-watching feels like. I would add to Ms. Tichi's speculation that post-modernism echoes (or produces) the Couch Potato phenomenon, which renders ironic the slug-a-bed passivity that literary moralists deplore: you can mainline your television and mock it. But if fiction simply transcribes an impoverished experience, is it not impoverished fiction? Ms. Tichi's observation is acute, but television cannot explain all of postmodernism. * It is also irresistible to observe that post-modernism extrapolates the long-established eclectic logic of American culture. Post-modernism was born in the United States because juxtaposition was always the essence of a polyethnic culture, less melting pot than grab bag. ''There is no distinctively American culture,'' the essayist Randolph Bourne wrote in 1916. ''It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of cultures.'' One side of American culture since Alexis de Tocqueville's description 150 years ago is the marketplace jamboree, amazing diversity striving for recognition, the shimmer of the evanescent, the tall tale meant to be simultaneously disbelieved and appreciated. No style, no subject is intrinsically superior to any other. Vulgarized pluralism is the cultural logic of laissez-faire ''anything goes'' is the motto of an elbows-out, noisy, jostling version of cultural democracy (or, if you don't like it, leveling). What could be more American than humbling the highbrow? In this sense, the essence of American culture is the variety show, finding a place for everyone - post-modernism's prototype. The raucous, disrespectful side of post-modernism has a root here. Unfortunately, so does the bland side. For the cult of the least common denominator is also an American tradition; we keep cultural peace by forcing everyone to sheathe swords. * Post-modernism is above all post-1960's; its keynote is cultural helplessness. It is post-Vietnam, post-New Left, post-hippie, post-Watergate. History was ruptured, passions have been expended, belief has become difficult; heroes have died and been replaced by celebrities. The 1960's exploded our belief in progress, which underlay the classical faith in linear order and moral clarity. Old verities crumbled, but new ones have not settled in. Self-regarding irony and blankness are a way of staving off anxieties, rages, terrors and hungers that have been kicked up but cannot find resolution. Paul Fussell has made the point that irony became standard in English writing after World War I as a way

to navigate around the unspeakable. The blank, I've-seen-it-all post-modernist tone, in this light, is self-imposed cultural anesthesia, a refusal to feel (except for punkish rage, in which only one thing can be felt: loathing). The fear is that what's underneath hurts too much; better repress it. * To which I would add a generational corollary. Post-modern currents run especially strong among readers and audiences born in the 1950's and 1960's. Post-modernism, in other words, has a demandas well as a supply-side. From this angle, post-mod is, let's face it, a yuppie outlook. It reflects an experience that takes for granted not only television but suburbs, shopping malls, recreational (not religious or transcendent) drugs and the towering abstraction of money. To grow up post-1960's is an experience of aftermath, privatization, weightlessness; everything has apparently been done. Therefore culture is a process of recycling; everything is juxtaposable to everything else because nothing matters. This generation is disabused of authority, except, perhaps, the authority of money; theirs is the bumper sticker, ''THE ONE WITH THE MOST TOYS WINS.'' (Perhaps the ultimate post-modern experience is to shift information bits and computer bytes around the world at will and high speed.) The culture they favor is a passive adaptation to feeling historically stranded - after the 1960's but before what? Perhaps the Bomb, the void hanging over the horizon, threatening to pulverize everything of value. So be cool. In this light, post-modernism is anticipatory shell shock. It's as if the Bomb has already fallen. Post-modernism, which fancies itself ever so disdainful of history, turns out to be all too embedded in (guess what) history. Such a variety of forces have funneled together to nourish post-modernism, it would appear the tendency will be with us for some time. What, then, is its impact on our literature? Pastiche lives off borrowed energies. The post-modern mode is compilation, recombination. In the visual and performing arts, this can wonderfully represent the oneness of the world - and the immigrant diversity of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. But pastiche writing tends to become a scrapbook, a compendium of antimoralism that shrieks moralistically, Look at me! and Who cares? When writing is imprisoned within previous writing, it can't attend to what hasn't been written, what hasn't yet been imagined. Numb, recombinant fiction therefore fails to bring the real news of subsurface feeling, sense and sensibility. Nor can it be a criticism of life. At its worst, it veers toward tourism, mannerism and mood music. Bret Easton Ellis's jejune ''Less Than Zero'' is an easy target, but I am more discouraged by the evasions of such novels as Joan Didion's ''Democracy'' and Denis Johnson's ''Stars at Noon,'' in which a stylized third world stands as a shaky backdrop for opaque intrigues. In this fiction, the larger world, whether banal or exotic, is blank; marooned ''characters'' stare and gesture in its direction. Neither person nor place quite exists, only portents. By contrast, there is a trenchant side to the post-modernist phenomenon. Consider Donald Barthelme's fiction, which hints at emotion beyond the junkyards of alluringly empty, mass-produced signs. Consider Art Spiegelman's brilliant ''Maus,'' which uses the form of a comic book (!) with talking animals (!!) to tell a story about a survivor telling a story about the Holocaust to his son - not for evasion's sake, and not to trash narrative form as such, but to tell the untellable to those for whom

the Holocaust has become ''a story.'' Consider Don DeLillo's ''White Noise,'' which goes beyond postmodernist blankness by suggesting (mockingly) that something is being evaded. The white noise of TV/death is disturbing because something out there - beneath images, surfaces, everyday banality - is trying to break through. Mr. DeLillo's fragments of TV speech are chilling, disruptive, shocking because out there in the wings is a baseline life capable of being chilled, disrupted, shocked. Television intrudes into something which is not television; there are real children, real toxic chemicals, real death. These works are exceptions; purists would deny they are post-modernist at all. But for the most part, post-modernist writing confesses (or celebrates!) helplessness. Make the most of stagnation, it says; give up gracefully. That is perhaps its defining break from modernism, which was, whatever its subversions, a series of declarations of faith - Constructivism's future, Joyce's present, Eliot's unsurpassable past. What is not clear is whether post-modernism, living off borrowed materials, has the resources for continuing self-renewal. A car with a dead battery can run off its generator only so long. Exhaustion is finally exhausting. But if it is true that deep social forces have been at work for a long time to produce the present cultural anesthesia, then post-modernism is not going to fade easily. Writers will have to do something else. They will have to cease being stenographers of the surface. They will have to decide not to coast down the currents of least resistance. Adapted from an essay by Todd Gitlin in ''Cultural Politics in Contemporary America'' edited by Ian Angus and Sut Jhally, to be published in January by Routledge.