Long Pauses

Tag: Postmodernism

  • A Few Words on . . .

    • Films Watched: The Battle of Algiers dir. by Gillo Pontecorvo; Down by Law dir. by Jim Jarmusch; Saraband dir. by Ingmar Bergman; 35 Up dir. by Michael Apted
    • Books Finished: Libra by Don DeLillo; The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation by Hayden White; The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
    • CDs Purchased: Howl by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club; Pixel Revolt by John Vanderslice; Donnie Darko (soundtrack) by Michael Andrews

    Remember that episode of The Office when David Brent interrupts a training seminar to sing his ode to the free love freeway? The comedy in that scene is about a mile-and-a-half thick. There’s the typical embarrassment of Brent’s colleagues, there’s Tim’s disbelieving stares into the camera and Gareth’s interruptions (“She’s dead”), but what I most love about the joke is that Brent, a middle-aged paper salesman from Slough, has written — and is earnestly performing — a song about driving a Cadillac through the American southwest, bedding lovely “senoritas” along the way.

    Oh, dear lord, how I wish I could chalk up Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s new album Howl to an extended exercise in irony. Generally speaking, I avoid power-trio rock-and-roll, but BRMC’s last record Take Them On, On Your Own was one of my favorites of 2004. It’s heavy when it needs to be but also features melodic songwriting and great guitar noise. Howl, apparently, is their attempt at “roots” music. Acoustic guitars? Check. Harmonicas? Check. T-Bone Burnett credit? Check. Song titles that make confused, sepia-toned allusions to southern spirituality and Depression-era heartache? Check. Apparently these California boys turned off their Jesus and Mary Chain records just long enough to watch O Brother Where Art Thou seven or eight times, and now they’ve lost their way in the funhouse of Americana simulacrum. Fortunately, The Disc Exchange has a ten-day return policy, so I’ll be getting that New Pornographers album instead.

    The week wasn’t a total bust for new music, though. After spending most of the last month listening obsessively to John Vanderslice’s “Exodus Damage,” I picked up the new album, Pixel Revolt, and it’s a beaut’. Vanderslice is a story-teller. Okay, so that’s not terribly unusual. But he’s a story-teller who works in genres. For example, “Continuation” is a police procedural. Seriously, it’s sung by a detective who’s working a case. And it has a cello solo. You’re probably going to laugh at some point during the first twenty-two seconds of the song. Then Vanderslice will start singing, and by the time he hits the chorus, you’ll be tapping your foot and smiling.

    Still high from the Miranda July film, I also picked up a used copy of the Donnie Darko soundtrack this week. (Both films were scored by Michael Andrews.) Except for its inclusion of three, barely-distinguishable versions of “Mad World,” I like it a lot. Maybe instead of a Fender Rhodes, I should be on the lookout for a Mellotron.

    Another week, another book of critical theory, another postmodern doorstop. In The Content of the Form, Hayden White asks, “Could we ever narrativize without moralizing?” For White, the interpretation of history, like the acts of fiction-making and criticism, is a moral and political act. Reading White alongside Don DeLillo’s Libra made for an interesting study of theory and praxis. DeLillo’s “Author’s Note,” included on the last rather than first page, reads:

    This is a work of imagination. While drawing from the historical record, I’ve made no attempt to furnish factual answers to any questions raised by the assassination.

    Any novel about a major unresolved event would aspire to fill some of the blank spaces in the known record. To do this, I’ve altered and embellished reality, extended real people into imagined space and time, invented incidents, dialogues, and characters.

    Libra, in effect, is about the writing of history, the transformation of “real” events into a narrative. It’s a job, DeLillo implies, shared by novelists, historians, CIA analysts, politicians, and anyone else — Lee Harvey Oswald, for example — who writes themselves into human history. That’s an admittedly pedantic description of a novel that was honest-to-god fun to read. I was blissfully ignorant of the JFK assassination before picking up the book, so I was swept quickly into the various intrigues and conspiracies. I have no idea at this point how much of the novel is “real,” which, I guess, is precisely the point.

    If I watched fewer films this week, it’s because much of my spare time was spent parsing through the list of 256 features and 79 shorts that will be playing at TIFF this year. Again, I’m holding off on commenting on the 7 Up films until I finish them all, and I have a longer response to Saraband in the works, which leaves only The Battle of Algiers and Down by Law. I missed Algiers during its theatrical re-release a year or two ago, and I’m sort of glad that, instead, I was able to see it now, at some remove from Bush’s march to war and the prison abuse scandals. That Pontecorvo’s film was made forty years ago, and that America now finds itself in a situation so similar to colonial France’s (the same arrogance, the same disregard for history, the same dehumanizing mistakes), is just maddening. It’s almost too much to watch — and I mean that as the most sincere compliment. Again, Doug has two really fine essays on the film and the DVD release.

    Down by Law is also a great film, and for completely different reasons. What happens in Jarmusch’s film is irrelevant — three guys are arrested and make a jailbreak — all that matters is that it happens to three guys who are endlessly watchable. John Lurie doesn’t so much act as simply embody cool. In fact, I like him best when he’s standing still or functioning as the straight man. Tom Waits is Tom Waits is Tom Waits. And Roberto Benigni, despite what you might think of him after Life is Beautiful and the Oscars, has some kind of superhuman comic timing and this crazy gift for swinging effortlessly between mania and pathos.

    When I first mentioned Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree, Bulb wrote in a comment, “I left [a copy] in my guest bathroom and it never fails to elicit favorable comments.” I don’t mind admitting that I read most of Spree two or three pages at a time. It’s great in small doses. Hornby tells us what he read, why he read it, and whether it was worth the effort, and he does so in a typically charming and insightful manner. I can’t write fiction. It’s a complete mystery to me. Which is why I so enjoy reading writers write about writing. Best of all, Spree has given me an unexpected and much-needed push toward the book shelf (and the blog).

  • Could You Define Post-Secularism?

    Mmmmm . . . probably not, or at least not well. Warning: this could get really boring.

    In the same way that postmodernism has always been a really problematic and contentious term, post-secular is just another attempt to fix a label on the questions that plague a particular era. For the last thirty years, most academics (at least in the humanities) have operated from the assumption that truth is a construct of cultural narratives or ideologies like religion or capitalism, and so a great deal of postmodern art has set out to expose very deliberately and self-consciously these “fictions” that control us.

    This belief has not been without its critics, though. Chief among them is Frederick Jameson, a Marxist who sees the postmodern era as one marked predominately by late-capitalism, which is, in more practical terms, globalization: all of culture and life and history, the world over, has been commodified — stripped of its particular meaning, affixed with a price, and reduced to its most superficial value. All we’re left with is what Jean Baudrillard calls “simulacrum” — a copy of something for which there is no original. Think The Matrix.

    For folks like Jameson, this tendency of postmodernism has serious political, social, and ethical consequences. If truth is just a construct of dominant ideologies, if history is an unknowable intertext, then what recourse do we have to making an ethical claim or critique? Postmodern thought, when taken to its logical extremes, is extremely nihilistic. We’re left with few options for improving our condition. We are, in effect, surrendering ourselves to the role of “cogs in the machine” (to borrow loosely from Marx).

    Until very recently, though, academics have lacked a critical framework for offering Sacred (for lack of a better word) critiques of postmodernism. But that’s starting to change, and the move has only been accelerated by 9/11. Many in the West have found the last year to be an occasion for re-examining spiritual beliefs and, just as importantly, for exploring the social and political currency in them. Once we’ve made a blanket statement like, “America’s system of representational democracy is better than the Taliban,” we’ve been forced to make an ideological commitment founded on something like objective truth.

    “Post-secular,” I think, is one way of trying to find the vocabulary for this type of stand. It’s a way of reconciling the good that was born from postmodernism, while acknowledging the value of the Sacred. As usual, the artists are a few steps ahead of the theorists on this one. In my blog entry of 11/5, I mentioned two recent plays by Patrick Marber that, like Angels in America in the 90s, dramatize this struggle in the personal journey of a representative character. I’m sure that we could come up with a list of other examples.

    Hope that does at least as much good as harm.

    And speaking of Marxism. . . . Have I mentioned lately that The Onion is really funny?

    Marxists’ Apartment A Microcosm Of Why Marxism Doesn’t Work

    AMHERST, MA—The filthy, disorganized apartment shared by three members of the Amherst College Marxist Society is a microcosm of why the social and economic utopia described in the writings of Karl Marx will never come to fruition, sources reported Monday.

    “The history of society is the inexorable history of class struggle,” said sixth-year undergraduate Kirk Dorff, 23, resting his feet on a coffee table cluttered with unpaid bills, crusted cereal bowls, and bongwater-stained socialist pamphlets. “The stage is set for the final struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the true productive class. We’re well aware of that here at 514 W. Elm Street, unlike other apartments on this supposedly intellectual campus. . . .”

  • Post-Secularism

    An e-mail that I received today sent me off on a rabbit trail, searching for more information about Parker Palmer. Palmer is an educator, activist, public speaker, and Quaker whose work examines the oft-ignored relationships between spirituality, teaching, and political change. In my wanderings, I stumbled upon this interview that was originally published in 2000 by Yes!, a great little ‘zine. It seemed like a natural follow-up to yesterday’s spotlight on Granny D.

    Sarah: One of the things that I found very striking about your work is the idea that the simple choice to live with integrity can have far-reaching effects. What experiences brought you to believe that this was such a central issue?

    Parker: What I know about living a divided life starts with my training as an academic. I was taught to keep things in airtight compartments: to keep my ideas apart from my feelings, because ideas were reliable but feelings were not; to keep my theories apart from my actions, because the theory can be pure, but the action is always sullied. . . .

    But the divided life is not just an academic dilemma, it’s a human dilemma. We work within institutions like schools, businesses, and civic society, because they provide us with opportunities that we value. But the claims those institutions make on us are sometimes at odds with our hearts – for example, the demand for loyalty to the corporation, right or wrong, can conflict with the inward imperative to speak truth. That tension can be creative, up to a point. But it becomes pathological when the heart becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the organization, when we internalize organizational logic and allow it to overwhelm the logic of our own lives.

    At a certain juncture, some people find they must choose between allowing selfhood to die or claiming their identity and integrity. What I mean by divided-no-more is living on the outside the truth you know on the inside.

    I’m glad to say that I’ve begun noticing some progress along these lines, at least in my particular wing of academia. Last week I spent more than an hour pitching my dissertation project to a new faculty member. It was an interesting experience. She was the first person to ask the big question: What’s the point? I waffled for a moment, then fell back on an old trick: I told her the truth. “I’m not sure, but I hope to find a personal, practical politics in the process,” I shrugged. She was interested.

    We spent the next 45 minutes discussing the growing interest (academic interest no less) in post-secularism, one of the many -isms vying for a prominent position in our post-postmodern age (if such jargon is even worth using). I love imagining the political implications of these questions:

    • What is the relation between literature and theology, secular or sacred? How does a focus on theology, religious studies, and/or ethics open new territories for literary study, particularly in the contemporary period? What do we gain by returning to the sacred or secular sacred in literary study? What do we lose?
    • Is there a post-secular literature as well as a post-secular theory, and what would this literature look like? What do the writers say? Was postmodernism theological without our realizing it?
    • How is current theory about the post-secular being imported into literary studies?
    • How are assertions of value in current discussions about literature and ethics/spirituality similar to and different from pre-formalist critical notions of value (and the political implications of such) embedded in concepts such as artistic vision, the visionary sublime, the truth of beauty, or the artist as shaman/oracle/priest?
    • Why is theology surfacing in literary studies now, after more than fifty years of formalist, marxist, poststructuralist, and postmodern theory? What cultural moment is precipitating the theoretical turn?
    • Has the sacred already been caught in the secular theory machine? Will 9/11 poison the post-secular well, particularly in terms of literary studies?
    • How can a post-secular literary criticism accommodate a world literature radically diverse in terms of politics, cultural and social values, and understandings of the sacred? Will a post-secular theoretical view necessarily war with a historical study of literature? What are the problemmatics raised in the relation between multicultural/pluralist/ethnic/race criticism and post-secular perspectives? How might the post-secular be redefined in a global context?
    • How might gender theory intersect with post-secular philosophy in relation to literary studies?
    • What are the possibilities of relation in literary criticism between humanism and the post-secular? Marxist theory and the post-secular? ethics and the post-secular?
    • How theological is the literature classroom? How post-secular should it be?

    I never thought I would be so excited to begin writing a dissertation. Bizarre.

  • The Public Burning (1976)

    By Robert Coover

    In the opening pages of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, the narrator, Vice President Richard Nixon, insecure about his notoriously sinister jowls, thinks to himself, “isn’t that a hell of a thing—that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?” Set during the days immediately preceding the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Coover’s satire explodes the absurd ties that bind infotainment to politics, words to history, and images to morality. Nixon makes a suitable and surprisingly sympathetic anti-hero, then, for he was perhaps America’s first politician to be publicly made, broken, reborn, then destroyed, each act broadcast live on television. Coover assumes our familiarity with those images and puts them to effective use, deliberately sounding echoes of Nixon’s “I am not a crook” Watergate days while revisiting the glorious victory of his “Checkers” speech. Nixon is simultaneously the candidate on stage, sweat-soaked and scruffy beside Kennedy’s sheen, and the President-elect with arms raised, victorious, finally, in ’68.

    “In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities—why did I keep forgetting that?” The fictional Nixon’s question is at the heart of Coover’s satire, and the heydays of the McCarthy Era give him ample fodder. It’s as if Coover is attempting to embody all of the complicated contradictions of the ’50s in a single novel, often to hilarious affect. Betty Crocker comes to life as the personification of idealized Eisenhower-era domesticity. Hollywood horror creatures walk the streets in 3D Technicolor, living projections of xenophobic hysteria. Walt Disney and Cecille B. DeMille elbow each other aside in their fight for marketing rights to the execution. Eisenhower morphs into Gary Cooper, strutting toward a potentially apocalyptic showdown at High Noon while uttering the lyric verse of Time Magazine (the nation’s Poet Laureate). And, most prominently, the irrational demands of the American populace become a walking, talking, cursing, spitting caricature in the person of Uncle Sam, who wants only to defeat his nebulous arch-villain, The Phantom, an enemy that most closely resembles communism, but is actually anything that might be labeled “un-American,” a loaded term, no doubt, in the early-’50s.

    Knowing something of The Public Burning‘s infamous reputation, I picked it up expecting to read a didactic denouncement of conservative hate-mongering built upon an equally didactic eulogy to the Rosenbergs, those most tragic and useable icons of the Old Left. What I got, instead, was something much more ambivalent and cynical: a satire with targets across the political spectrum. In an onanistic fantasy that would make Portnoy blush, Nixon attacks Ethel’s naïve devotion to an irrelevant idealism, voicing the questions that all on the Left have struggled to answer in post-WWII America: “What about Stalin’s purges? The death camps in Siberia? The massacres in Poland? What about Rudolph Slansky just last fall in Prague? Eh?” Her response is typical of the impotent liberalism that has characterized so much of the New Left. Coover captures this beautifully in an image of Julius and Ethel exchanging letters of praise for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that they root for despite their complete ignorance of baseball. Edith writes: “It is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory.”

    The warden at Sing-Sing offers an interesting insight into the Rosenbergs: “the problem has been their habit of behaving in what they probably think of as, well, symbolic ways—you know, acting like they’re establishing historical models or precedents or something.” There’s a strange irony to the line, given its context within a novel that, even in its title, treats their execution as a sacrificial rite. As with much postmodern fiction of the ’70s, that irony is often so thick here that it becomes difficult to find a foundation. Are the Rosenbergs heroic martyrs or treasonous dupes? Both, Coover seems to say, and neither. Left and Right, right and wrong all collapse into an absurd political/social/moral quagmire that is put on ridiculous display in the novel’s final pages. At the site of the execution—fantastically transposed from Sing Sing to the middle of Times Square—Nixon appears with his pants around his ankles, fully erect, then brings the crowd to a riotous frenzy as history dissolves around them. Abolitionists, comanches, and redcoats stand shoulder to shoulder with the members of the Supreme Court, who roll around in the piles of shit left there by the Republican elephant. Uncle Sam appears in a flash of light, then bends Nixon over, sodomizing him. “You’re not the same as when I was a boy,” is all the Vice President can muster in reply. It ain’t a pretty scene, but neither is America, Coover screams.

  • Breathless (1960)

    Breathless (1960)

    Dir. by Jean-Luc Godard

    Images: Typical Godard, though toned down a bit in comparison to his later films: frequent jump cuts and moments of deliberate self-awareness, as in those scenes in which first Michel, then Patricia, address the camera directly. Film moderates between break-neck pacing (the shooting of the police officer, for instance) and slow introspection (Michel and Patricia talking in her apartment). Key point: Godard reminds us constantly that we are watching a movie, as in the carefully choreographed kisses and Michel’s obsession with Bogart.

    • • •

    If asked to define postmodernism, I would probably cheat and just show an early Godard film. Breathless likely wouldn’t be my first choice — I’d take Alphaville or A Woman is a Woman — but it certainly fits the bill. Godard caused a sensation forty years ago with this, his first film, by not only tearing down cinematic and narrative conventions, but by doing so with a sly, mocking wink to his audience. Like the best postmodern art, Breathless blurs the boundaries between high and low culture, elevating B-movie sensation onto the plane of high French art and, thankfully, humbling and demystifying the latter in the process. Its greatest asset, I think, is that it does so with a fun, irreverent self-awareness that prevents us from ever forgetting that the story we’re watching unfold before us — like life itself, some postmodernists would argue — is nothing more than that: a fiction.

    The story is simple: Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a charismatic young thug wanted by police for shooting an officer. Penniless, alone, and, well, horny, he attaches himself to Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), a beautiful American student and aspiring journalist. The majority of the film chronicles Michel’s frustrated efforts to: 1) track down money owed to him so that he can escape to Italy, and 2) get Patricia back into bed. Technically, he succeeds in both endeavors, but, as has been the case with all storied young lovers on the run, before and since, his successes are always fleeting. “I want us to be like Romeo and Juliet,” Patricia naively tells Michel. Shakespeare this ain’t, but Michel’s fate is as inevitable as that poor sap’s from Verona.

    Along with inspiring countless imitators, from Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands to Natural Born Killers (not to mention that embarrassing Richard Gere remake), Breathless is most often remembered for — and remains fascinating today because of — Godard’s deliberate disregard for convention, both as a filmmaker and as a story-teller. His technical innovations, particularly the frequent jump cuts and hand held cinematography, have, in the four decades since, become the stuff of prime-time network TV (NYPD Blue comes to mind). Likewise, Godard’s rebellious irony and self-conscious play with film iconography (as seen most famously in Michel’s long gaze at a Humphrey Bogart lobby card) have become key terms in the contemporary film vocabulary — think The Simpsons, Pulp Fiction, Scream, and the like.

    What most fascinates me about Breathless, though, and what makes it still feel revolutionary today, is Godard’s fascination with the parts of life that we (still) rarely see on the screen. Midway through the film, when most “young lovers on the run” movies would turn their attention to a violent heist or a gratuitous sex scene, we follow Michel to Patricia’s apartment, where the two simply pass the time in idle conversation, waiting (like we do) for the excitement to begin again. The scene does help to further develop the characters — Patricia’s love and understanding of art distinguishes her further from Michel, who is still interested only in getting Patricia undressed — but, as was the case for many of his New Wave contemporaries, Godard evidences little hope for genuine communication. Michel and Patricia are characters in a film who behave as if they were characters in a film, performing their superficial roles/lives for the benefit of others, oblivious to the consequences.

    As with much postmodern art, my main critique of Breathless is ethical. The blurring of boundaries between high/low, fact/fiction, performance/life, though vital and beneficial to much that has happened socially and politically in the past four decades, can also collapse dangerously into total relativism. Godard has called Michel an “Anarchist Hero,” meaning, I assume, that his rebellion against authority is a martyrdom of sorts for the cause of greater freedom for all. Noble, I guess, and I probably would have bought it ten years ago. But it feels overly romantic and naïve to me now. Actually, it feels like the unbridled energy and maturing (but still immature) philosophy of a first-time filmmaker.

  • Broom of the System (1987)

     

    By David Foster Wallace

    Lenore Beadsman’s life is complicated. The 24 year old heir to the Beadsman baby food empire struggles to balance her career as a call center operator — where the lines of communication seem perpetually crossed — with her, um, complex relationship with her boss, Rick Vigorous, of Frequent and Vigorous Publishing. She also worries about her younger bother, who refers to himself as the Antichrist; her bird, Vlad the Impaler, which has a tendency to curse and prophesy; and her grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein who has suddenly gone missing from her retirement home.

    The majority of Broom of the System, first published in 1987, takes place in the future (1990, actually), which allows Wallace the freedom to distort the otherwise recognizable landscape of his northern Ohio. Here, popular culture has literally shaped life: an entire city has, in fact, been designed to resemble Jayne Mansfield from above. College students meet to watch Bob Newhart and play drinking games; others gather at a bar built around a Gilligan’s Island theme. Wallace, a former philosophy major, had obviously been reading Baudrillard, as he has great linguistic fun interrogating the simulacrum — the copies of copies of copies that have come to replace actual experience in contemporary American culture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a man-made blot intended to serve as “A point of reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love. A blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls. An Other for Ohio’s Self.”

    Wallace’s first novel, written as his MFA thesis, is obviously heavily indebted to (but not entirely derivative of) Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Both are detective stories of a Post-Modern, epistemological bent, more concerned with the language that constructs meaning — both in their stories and in the world — than with the literal “truth” that their heroines pursue. And both authors push the conceit to hilariously absurd ends. Wallace even one-ups Pynchon’s famous final scene — Oedipa Maas sits, waiting like we do, for the mystery to be revealed — by actually ending Broom of the System mid-sentence. It’s perhaps too easy of a trick, and one that must surely make the more mature Wallace cringe, but it feels perfectly appropriate here.