Post to Post-post, Maybe

Here's a quotation from Marjorie Perloff's "Postmodernism / fin de siecle" - a few years old but useful yet.

“…the works of Anderson and Rosler, Birnbaum and Levine, Sherman and Kruger remain just that: exempla, demonstrating how valid Lacan's discussion of the Law of the Father, Lyotard's notion of the postmodern "unrepresentable," and Foucault's analysis of the power system are. Ironically, then, the women artists in question continue to be victimized--if not by the patriarchy of modernist critique and the art market, then by the French theoretical model which their work so nicely illustrates. The real power, in other words, belongs not to the postmodern artist (Anderson, Sherman) but to the poststructuralist theorist whose principles validate the work. No wonder, then, that recent handbooks on postmodernism--and they are now legion-- reduce what was once the excitement of the Cutting Edge to a list of rules and prescriptions that make one almost long for the days of Understanding Poetry” (191).

Here then is Perloff’s chief support for her claim of postmodernity’s having gone astray, and my chief support for postmodernity’s being a bankrupt, dead-end endeavor: in asserting the local interdeterminate meaning of all meaning, postmodernism has had to lean on its theorists heavily in order to assert itself as a viable critical theory; in so doing, it became (and is) another Lyotardian metanarrative. When literary judges rap gavel about the rulelessness of contemporary discourse, they impose rules. So therefore postmodernism would seem to be a needless excursion in the trip to make meaningful articulations; if a story / poem / international vector of discourse is likened to an Interstate, postmodernism is the off-ramp where you can stock up on Stuckey’s and listen to the gasman’s tales of familial woe, and you revel in the feather head-dresses, mini license plate with your name, and gorge on spinning corn dogs. Perloff points out though that you have to hop back on the road eventually. You have to keep going. You have to actually say something, you have to get over the mountains. That’s what I think anyway. Perloff might not agree; she seems to advocate a postmodernism redivivus, reconsecrated to the flotsam of local meaning, rather than (as postmodernism in this ever-longer analogy would say) stick around and understand the filling station’s pleasures while saying “Hey, how cool, we’re touring the Interstate, what a cool Stuckey’s, way better than what I’m used to!” Perloff would shame-shame those postmodernists but advocates a reinvigorated brand of same. I say get back on the road.