POSTMODERN VOCABULARY

1) UNDECIDABILITY
involves the impossibility of deciding between two or more
competing interpretations.
The postmodern gives particular emphasis to ways in which this
law may be productively questioned or suspended. A classical
example of this is the Cretan liar paradox.
What the new critics of the middle of the twentieth century
called ambiguity or paradox is now considered in terms of
undecidability.
The difference is that for the new critics literary texts tended to
exploit the polysemic potential of language to create a unied
whole in which ambiguity produced an enriching of the texts
nal unity. For postmodern critics, by contrast, undecidability
radically undermines the very principle of unity: these critics
celebrate multiplicity, heterogeneity and difference.

2) A NEW ENLIGHTENMENT
Theorists of the postmodern are drawn into that exhilarating as
well as terrifying play of a text thrown up by its forms of
undecidability.For those nervous of the postmodern, this is
deemed to amount simply to nihilism and chaos.
The writing in 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
argue that Enlightenment is totalitarian. Enlightenment
here can be understood very generally as a way of characterizing
Western thought since the seventeenth century. The notion of
the Enlightenment entails the assertion of the power of reason
over both superstition and nature, the belief that a combination
of abstract reason and empirical science will lead to knowledge
and eventually to political and social progress. By contrast, the
postmodern is sceptical about claims of progress in history, not
least because of the necessary marginalization (of the
apparently non-progressive) which it entails.

 A common misunderstanding of the postmodern is that it

involves simply an assertion and celebration of the irrational.
The postmodern could be seen as concerned rather with what
Jacques Derrida calls a new enlightenment (Derrida 1988, 141)
concerned to explore the value and importance of ways of
thinking that cannot be reduced to an opposition between the
rational and the irrational.

3) DISSEMINATION
Postmodern resistance to totalizing forces such as rationalism or
irrationalism means that its characteristic form is fragmentary..
postmodern entails a new kind of critique of the very ideas of
fragment and totality. .
fragmentation in the postmodern does not depend on the
possibility of an original unity which has been lost. The
romantics and modernists, by contrast, tend to gure
fragmentation in terms of the loss of an original wholeness.
Another way of thinking about postmodern fragmentation is in
terms of dissemination. Dissemination involves a sense of
scattering, a scattering of origins and ends, of identity, centre
and presence. Postmodern fragmentation is without origins, it is
dissemination without any assurance of a centre or destination.

4) LITTLE AND GRAND NARRATIVES

One of the best-known distinctions in the postmodern is that
made by JeanFranois Lyotard concerning what he calls
grand narratives and little narratives.

Grand narratives

such as Christianity,
Marxism, the Enlightenment
attempt to provide a
framework for everything.
follow a teleological
movement towards a time of
equality and justice.

Little narratives
Contemporary Western
discourse is characteristically
unstable, fragmented,
dispersed not a world-view at
all.
fragmentary, non-totalizing
and non-teleological.
present local explanations of
individual events or
phenomena but do not claim to
explain everything.

5) SIMULATION
Contrast with the representation.
Short-circuits such distinction
Saturated by images- on computers, TV, advertising hoardings,
magazines, newspapers and so on- the real become unthinkable
without the copy.
Involves the disturbing idea that the copy is not a copy of
something real; the real is inextricable from the signicance
and effect of the copy.
This leads to the world of what Jean Baudrillard calls the
hyperreal, in which reality is fabricated by the technology.

6) DEPTHLESSNESS
Another way of talking about simulation or the simulacrum is in
terms of depthlessness. If one governing opposition for Western
thought has been between the real and the copy, between nature
and artice, another has been between surface and depth
An obvious example of this would be the notion of expression,
which involves the idea that the words which we write or speak
expresssomething inside our heads (thoughts and feelings). The
words are the surface, whereas our thoughts or consciousness
represent depth.

 Fredric Jameson provides a useful account of four depth models

that, he argues, have dominated the West in the twentieth
century (Jameson 1993, 70):
Marxism
Psychoanalysis
Existentialism
Semiotics
In each case, the authentic or real is understood to be hidden or
disguised, while the surface phenomenon, the facade, is an
inauthentic distortion or arbitrary offshoot of the underlying
truth. With the postmodern, all of these surface-depth
models are shaken up. The postmodern suspends,
dislocates and transforms the oppositional structures
presupposed by major Western modes of thought.

7) Pastiche
Jameson also distinguishes between parody and pastiche. Both
rely on imitation of earlier texts or objects.
In parody, there is an impulse to ridicule by exaggerating the
distance of the original text from normal discourse.
The postmodern, however, no longer accepts the notion of
normal language: pastiche is blank parody in which there is
no single model followed, no single impulse such as ridicule and
no sense of a distance from any norm
This hybridization, a radical intertexuality mixing forms,
genres, conventions, media, dissolves boundaries between high
and low art, between the serious and the ludic.

 Genre becomes explicitly unstable

EXAMPLES:
especially in such texts as Vladimir Nabakovs Pale Fire(1963),
which mixes up a poem with a literary-critical analysis and
political thriller,
John Fowless The French Lieutenants Woman(1969), which
uses history textbooks to tell a love story,
D.M. Thomass The White Hotel (1981), which exploits the
genres of poetry and psychoanalytic case-study,
David Eggerss A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius(2000), which infuriatingly resists our desire to categorize
it as either autobiography or novel (Based on a true story, the
book proclaims on its cover).

 Two of the most creative and powerful television drama

series yet produced are exemplary in this respect: David
Lynchs Twin Peaks (1990) mixes up the detective story
with forms such as horror, avant-garde or art-house movies,
soap opera and so on
Dennis Potters The Singing Detective (1986) dissolves the
borders between the detective story, Hollywood musicals,
psychological dramas, and the Bildungsroman.

8) The unpresentable
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts
forward the unpresentable in presentation itself: that
which denies itself the solace of good forms, the
consensus of a taste which would make it possible to
share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that
which searches for new presentations, not in order to
enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the
unpresentable . . . the artist and the writer, then, are
working without rules in order to formulate the rules of
what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and
text have the characters of an event . . . Post
modernwould have to be understood according to the
paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo). (Lyotard
1992, 14950)

 The unpresentable is an effect, not least, of a

disturbance of temporality, of the linear progression of
time. The postmodern is grammatically specied as
inhabiting the future perfect, what will have been. There
is no pure present on the basis of which re-presentation
may take place.

9) Decentring
The postmodern challenges the logo-centric - the
authority of the word, the possibility of nal meanings or of
being in the presence of pure sense.
It challenges the ethnocentric - the authority of one ethnic
identity or culture such as Europe or the West or Islam
or Hinduism.
It challenges the phallocentric - everything that privileges
the symbolic power and signicance of the phallus.
As Ihab Hassan remarks, the postmodern may be
summarized by a list of words prexed by de- and di-:
deconstruction, decentring, dissemination, dispersal,
displacement, difference, discontinuity, demystication,
delegitimation, disappearance (Hassan 1989, 309).