Introduction - An explanation of postmodernism

Style, Fall, 1999 by David Gorman

I have a confession to make. I am addicted to the word "postmodernism." For a long time, I tried to live without it. "It's a stupid word," I said to myself, "and I am just going to avoid using it." But I found that I could not. So I have fallen off the wagon and gone back to using it and its cognates: "postmodern," "postmodernity," "postmodernist." I use them all, despite the shame and anxiety.

What is stupid about the word? Not so much its meaning, but its use. Words in themselves are rarely stupid. (For an exception, consider racial slurs.) In its earliest uses in critical discourse, all that "postmodernism" seems to have been meant to do was to provide a provisional label for various emerging tendencies in literature, the other arts, and in culture generally. Nothing wrong with that: the job of trying to describe recent developments in the arts is one that is always with us in the humanities. And if we only used words like "postmodern" in this provisional sort of way, there could be no objection to it.

But more recently a very different use has been imposed on terms like "postmodern" and its kin. It has come to be used as a period term, like "medieval" or "romantic." This usage seems unproblematic, even obvious--only compare: "modernism"/"postmodernism." If one is okay, surely the other must be. But it is not okay. Here is the difficulty. "Modernism" is a straightforward period term. Yes, there may be all kinds of disagreements about its definition or application. That happens with all period terms, and it is a big reason why they are interesting. Although "postmodernism" seems as if it should fit this pattern easily, it fails, because the period it covers, however that may be defined, is supposed to include the present. Unfortunately, the present is not a period.

This sounds like a paradox, but none is intended. (Paradoxes are boring.) Some day, no doubt, the present will be a period: future scholars, critics, and others will look back on the later twentieth century, or the decade of the 1990s, or whatever, and label it or otherwise describe it as the "era of[ldots]" Well, of what? This is just what we cannot say, living--as we only can--in the present. Anyone who has done any historical study should understand this. The rule with period terms and related characterizations is that they are applied retroactively. I teach courses in Renaissance literature, and I always begin by telling my students something like this: "It was not as if, on January 1, 1400, or whenever, people got out of bed and said, 'Hey! It's the Renaissance! Now we can stop wearing those pointy shoes!'" People in 1400 might perfectly well have had terms for describing themselves and their period, but the rule of historical periodization is that the historical self-descriptions used in any period con stitute pieces of evidence for historians studying that period, not something to be adopted by historians in their own descriptions of the period, which are always redescriptions.

So: the present will be a period, in the future, as seen in hindsight. But in the present it is not (yet) a period; we may have insight into the present, but we cannot model that insight on hindsight. What would be stupid would be to use a term (like, ahem, "postmodernism") as if we could. The mistake here is to think that the methods or perspectives of historical study and criticism can be applied to the present--as Nietzsche explained, once and for all, or so one would have thought. But maybe "stupid" is the wrong word; I have a guess about what caused the mistake. In the humanities--home of the jargon of postmodernity--one of our mandates is to respond to works (literary and otherwise); meanwhile, another is to approach works contextually and, especially, in terms of their historical period. Thus, for critics wanting to respond to contemporary works, it was actually pretty natural to conflate the mandates by automatically trying to locate those works in a period, resulting in the fabrication of a "postmod ern" period.

If all this is true, what kept me from kicking the "postmodernism" habit? Is the term really so unavoidable, so indispensable? That is what I have found. What I was trying to kick was only this incoherent use of "postmodernity" and the rest as period terms. But these words have a meaning that we cannot shrug off so easily. Although it may be senseless to try to periodize our own time historically for the purposes of criticism, simply abandoning the job of responding to recent literature, art, or culture is not an option either. If we just refuse to address contemporary literature, the effect is to turn the rest of literature into so many dead monuments, to be discussed only in hushed tones. "Hamlet had an opening night" is another thing that I say to my students: "and nobody going there whispered 'We're going to see Hamlet, by (gasp!) Shakespeare[ldots]'" But how can we understand this unless we have a sense of what an opening night is--of how literature appears, not in textbooks, but in the living present? So, of course we should discuss recent and current literature, culture, and so on. And, as critics, we gotta use words to talk about these things. "Postmodernism" is a fine word to use, if this is how we use it--not as a term for some historical period that we can perceive objectively even though we are living in the middle of it, but as part of a provisional vocabulary, something future historians will look back upon--probably with some condescension--as evidence of a self-conception that, although useful and necessary to us, can never be complete.