Saturday, June 27, 2009
for your reading pleasure muahahahaa
ACJC 2008 C2 TERM EXAM
Yet “postmodernism” is a clumsy and unilluminating term, for various reasons. The first has to do with “modernism” itself. In art – literary, musical and visual – Modernism, with a capital “M”, was a movement, largely taking place between the two world wars and, in literature at least, having its annus mirabilis as early as 1922, with the publication of arguably the greatest poem and novel of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
What does seem to be agreed is that the essence of postmodernism, in relation to the reading, teaching and appreciation of written texts, is that, first, there is no limit to be set on what might qualify as a “text” (a bus ticket will do) and no absolute value to be placed on any particular quality of a text: with regard to its aesthetic value, or its significance with reference to its meaningfulness or meaninglessness – let alone any qualities of a moral or spiritual kind, its celebration of eternal verities (which are a chimera in any case). Therefore, there are no “canonical” texts, for example, in the study of literatures in English – no necessary, required reading for graduates with an English Literature degree: a qualification it is perfectly possible to obtain, today, without having read a word of Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Yeats or T.S. Eliot – the greatest poets of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here, postmodernism is a synonym for intellectual chaos and ignorance.
Essentially, postmodernism is a political phenomenon, deriving from the culture of resentment and victimhood which is one of the least edifying outcomes of the increasingly democratic and demotic twentieth century in Western societies. It is a peculiarly self-defeating, self-destructive and paradoxical phenomenon because, in its opposition to what – in a shorthand term – we might call “high art”, the very people who it is depriving of access to the classics (through demonising them, their creators and their purveyors, as a conspiracy of oppressive elitism or proposing the Marxist dismissal of them as conspicuous waste) are left with a mess of pottage of works which are condescendingly and patronisingly deemed to be the only suitable and “relevant” study for the demos.
Part of the problem with the present-day teaching of literature – apart from the initially disabling conviction that it would be better if “literature”, as a concept, didn’t exist -- is that we know too much. Burdened by the daunting mass of knowledge about the past, for example – now available at your fingertips on the Internet – readers and teachers and syllabus-composers are not unsurprisingly drawn to the watered-down versions of postmodernist theory (which, the philosophers tell me, are so watered down as to be a contradiction of its genuine theoretical bases in the thought of such as Derrida and Foucault). These can, by a theoretical sleight of hand, dispose of the requirements of layers of knowledge which were once required to be brought to the reading of any text worth reading. When this is linked to a politically-driven program to discredit the past in general – which was wrong about everything (only the present, and your present, precisely, having any value or validity) – and an aggressive rejection of any requirement to be humble (or humbled) before the works of genius (derided as a social construction imposed upon the powerless to ensure their submission to elites), that anything of value from the past survives is astonishing.
What are the qualities that distinguish a great work of literary art? All but one of these are offensive to what we might generally gather under the umbrella term of a postmodernist approach to the reading, teaching and appreciation of literary texts. The exception is the close attention to structures of language (or “discourse”, as they like to call it), animated by and expressive of that complexity and subtlety which we expect to find in great literary texts. This, in postmodernist textual study, at its best, is salutary. Unfortunately, it has two major drawbacks. First, the weaker brethren find it the least congenial process of reading, so are inclined to resort to other boiled-down aspects of postmodernist theorising, such as the non-idea of reading and evaluating a text purely in terms of what it says to you, the reader, and how it speaks to your life (and your “journey”, to use one of the terms beloved of syllabus composers), without regard to the contexts biographical, intellectual, historical and social which produced it and to which any intelligent reading of a text must submit in order for a cogent comprehension and assessment of it even to be initiated.
And secondly, it misses the essential point of literary study, by focusing attention on structure rather than meaning which, in combination with the reader-centred evaluation, counteracts the power of a great text to lift us out of our own inevitably limited selfhood and contemporary situation to focus on a larger interpretation of life and human existence which may utterly contradict everything that we, to date, have believed or accepted as valuable, but which encourages our attention because of the combination of intellectual substance and aesthetic accomplishment which are the hallmarks of great artistic expression in literature and which, in time, may come to sustain us in life itself. This, for the postmodernist, is a bourgeois fantasy. The self is the only self-sustaining entity, alone and palely loitering in the wasted land of postmodernist subjectivism, in the final death-throes of Romanticism which is contemporary culture.
Literature should be occupied about its proper and ancient business, of the immortal expression of profound truths, challenging the decay of present mores – Wordsworth has the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath in mind – it thus presents a vision of and response to life that perennial in its cope and expression. The challenge – and no-one is denying that the fact is difficult ( that is part of what makes it worthwhole) is to submit to what it has to say, connect with it through a considerable amount of research (into the circumstances of the poem’s composition and its various references), and the see how and whty it has spoken to readers.
How convincing is the author’s conclusion? Support your answer with relevant ideas pertaining to the field of Aesthetics.
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The author’s main conclusion seems to be that we should not accept the postmodernist school of thought in terms of aesthetics on the grounds that subscription to this theory devalues the great and amazing artworks of the past and makes art less able to be appreciated by the masses, since all art is of the same worth. He has a few main arguments that lead to this conclusion, most of which are severely biased in their language. Firstly, before I delve deeper into analysing the content of his article, I have to say that the language he has chosen for the purpose of this essay is bias and to a certain extent, excessive and verbose. He has obviously been indulging himself such that he would be able to easily sway the readers to side with his blatantly prejudiced and conservative viewpoint. Moreover, he attempts to confuse the readers by adding many hidden rhetoric within his hardly controlled use of parentheses, eventually making his points rather broken and linguistically incoherent, hence the reader finds it hard to follow his argument with a clear-headed mind.
The first argument he has made is that the definition of postmodernism is in the first place hard to pin down, such that there is no proper definition for him to work with should he use postmodernism. However, this school of thought is defined in this way, because, in colloquial language, ‘anything goes’. There is no other need for improving on this definition, because it is both redundant and impossible. There are no ‘restrictions’ that can be placed in this school of thought, because it accepts everything to have aesthetic value. From this, we can tell that the author is stubborn in his own way of thinking that he does not learn to accept this when it is obviously being defined for him to its fullest extent. He then tries to expound on the ‘inception’ of postmodernism and how it actually came about, by attempting to relate it to modernism. However, it is said that postmodernism is a recalcitrant extrapolation of modernism; it is modernism brought to the extremes such that the denial of traditional beliefs are deconstructed and that is why everything is said then to have equal value. The author already shows his inherent anti-postmodernism sentiments in that he says that the best works of literature are TS Elliot’s The Waste Land, in this case he already assumes there is a standard to live by, when in postmodernism there is nothing.
He goes on to argue that postmodernism should not be accepted since everything and anything can be accepted as a literary text, regardless of its aesthetic value. Hence in postmodernism there can be no ‘canonical texts’ that we can look up to as the Greatest Works of Art of All Time. He seems to make a logical argument here, in postmodernism might lead to a degradation of aesthetic value in art pieces due to its equitable nature of accepting everything. It is right that one may have been enlightened by reading works of Milton or Pope or Wordsworth or Yeats or TS Elliot, but it does not rule out the fact that we achieve enlightenment from other authors too. For instance, we can look at Samuel Beckett and his literary pieces, though minimalist, they do shed light onto the aspects of human nature that we may fail to see sometimes. He is unwilling to accept that it is possible to glean knowledge of the arts from artworks that are not, or rather, have not been accepted yet, and yet he is already ruling out their possibility on enlightening us.
The author brought this further in saying that we are essentially depriving the access to the classics through its demonization, but this is far from true. Postmodernism does not devalue texts, they merely bring every piece of art (that is to be called art) to the same aesthetic level, demonising to far too strong a word in this case. Just because other pieces of art can be accepted, it does not mean that the people are unable to access the art pieces. We are not left with a ‘mess of pottage of works’, we have been given a larger variety of works to choose and understand the world from, such that we are not only limited to the ‘elitist’ views of great poets, but also various reclusive artists as well. We would not want everyone to be enlightened in only one way, do we? Here, the author emphasises the importance of Classics, but without paradigm shifts and revolutions in culture, how could we have gotten such a myriad of classics that we can learn from? It goes to show that only with change can we be ever-learning and ever-enlightened. According to Kuhn, the theories are only true within the paradigm of this era. However, if we move on and be open to other ways of truth that may only be true in other paradigms, it may not necessarily be closer to the truth, but it is this progress that would lead to the eventual realisation of the truth. This is to say that if we are stubborn and obstinate and just conservative and merely wish to live in the past, it is impossible to glean new knowledge.
The author then goes on the say that postmodernism is a move which is ‘linked to a politically-driven program to discredit the past’ and this rejects ‘the requirement to be humble before the works of genius’. This seems to actually explain the major flaws in postmodernism, I concede, but it is unfair to say that it discredits the past; it seems to being more open and accepting the future and welcoming new pieces to be called art. [Time’s up] It is exactly this openness that led to where we are today; if people only listened to Mozart of the Classical Era and thought that Debussy’s pieces of the Romantic Era were utter rubbish, we would have never had this move that would eventually lead to the various kinds of music that we have now, say jazz and rock. If Gauguin did not start impressionist painting and only kept the style of say, Manet’ realist paintings, then we would not have movements that would have led to painting we see around us now. If we will always have to retrospect and forever live under the shadows of the ‘great’ people of the past, how are we to move on and produce new genres of art? While subscribing to the theory of Historical, it seems that there is great importance of keeping the tradition of art that have been long-considered art to stay as those epitomes of art, but if we only look at these epitomes of art, we may be missing out on so much more there is the world has to give us in terms of aesthetics. Merely look into the past will not help us to advance into the future and achieve new forms of knowledge, because we can attest to the unreliability of knowledge in that era, as shown by the Copernican and Heliocentric model of the solar system.
He starts to state that postmodernism would in fact be devaluing pieces of art, when ‘the weaker brethren finds it the least congenial process of learning’. He starts saying that these people will start evaluating art on how it speaks to you, and not exactly on how context produces it. In the first place, who is he to say that evaluating it based on what emotive or cognitive responses we get from it is wrong? Sure, we can ascribe to the theory of Representation and say that the art work has to have a comment on the world at large. But we cannot say for sure that that is what the artist intended in the first place, he might have had something else in mind. However, if we accept that art can speak to you, through catharsis as put forth by Aristotle, then by the Expression theory we are actually obtaining truths about beauty of the art pieces, even though they are non-propositional knowledge that cannot in any way be quantified. However, as long as we know in our own hearts what they have spoken to us, it is a sufficient condition for us to use it as a way of improving our lives as it may have shown us insights in our human nature. And is that not what the pursuit is all about, advancing the nature of humans?
The author starts saying that postmodernism focuses more on structure than on meaning, as he thinks that intellectual substance and aesthetic judgement are ‘hallmarks of great artistic expression, but these to a postmodernist is merely a ‘bourgeois fantasy’. Here he is once again assuming that postmodernism destroys what there is left of intellectual substance and aesthetic judgement. However, even though postmodernism allows for anything to be art, what knowledge each and every single individual gleans from the art is very diverse and in fact is still the same. For instance, no matter if we subscribe to knowing that that certain artwork, say Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh is recognised as a renowned piece of art, when we look at it, we will still be feeling the awe of the large celestial bodies exhibited and yet the darkness that looms within. It is under only the circumstance of taking Institutionalism as a subscribed theory will we have biased viewpoints towards art that is recognised and art that is not. This is an extremely fallacious theory as this excludes the fact that we can actually achieve knowledge from obscure unrecognised art, which is not impossible.
In conclusion, I feel that the author is not giving both sides of the picture, as he only writes against postmodernism and does not celebrate the fact that postmodernism may actually be the way that we may expand our knowledge of aesthetics and embrace that many other things can be considered to be art, not merely the ones that curators say are. And hence, even though his conclusions mostly logically flow from his premises, I do disagree with much of his premises (and language) and hence I am not thoroughly convinced by his conclusion.
wishing;
1:00 PM
