Kyle Gillette
Jameson’s “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” uses the terms pastiche and schizophrenia to invoke both the differences between postmodernism and modernism and the ways in which postmodern art and culture specifically depend on, react to, rebel against, and exaggerate modernism’s priorities. Reading what I assume to be Ehren’s marginalia (but which might equally interestingly be a stranger’s) is a rather postmodern experience, I think, of postmodernism’s exaggeration of modernism’s self-reflexivity, especially when under Jameson’s contention that “contemporary or postmodern art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way” Ehren writes that “pomo art is imminently self-reflexive”; this reflection between text and metatext about self-reflexive metatextuality itself suggests that the way
My attempt
at a little intervention. –E.F. Yes, those are my marginalia. There is a way in which what Montaigne called “glosses on
postmodern self-reflection differs from modern is in its radicalization of meta-discourse until the discourse vanishes and all
glosses” has
a particularly pomo quality. All is gloss, all is intertext,
all is marginalia, there’s no primary text.
But if I can be a bit per-
that is left is the meta.
snickety for a moment . . . actually,
what I wrote in the margin is “pomo art is immanently self-reflexive.” I guess I want to insist on the
Though, as Ehren
(or not Ehren) notes in the margins, Jameson doesn’t initially include
referent at
least that much, even if the referent is an “a” rather than an ‘’i.” My point is . .
. evidence still matters in pomo,
and I’m not sure discourse, let alone evidence, entirely disappears into the
meta-. The evidence may be obscure and
illegible, but it’s not exactly a consensual hallucination. The world doesn’t entirely disappear into the
letter, no?
theater of the 70s and 80s as one of the major fields where these shifts can be seen, he does at least give a passing nod to Robert Wilson in a list of important postmodern artists whom Jameson “is very far from believing” is actually schizophrenic, despite the cultural schizophrenia his work presumably expresses, even helps to instantiate. I wonder if the initial omission is a problem of medium, if Jameson resists allowing theater to come to mind because theatrical modernists like Pirandello and Brecht had made of theater a too-easily polarized duality between theatrical fiction and the “real” space and time of the theater that always critiqued it.
This seems like the more
substantive issue: how the fictive and
real are imbricated and not in a “too-easily
polarized duality”; how the meta and the
framed-by-the-meta are entangled. The meta doesn’t offer a position over and above in pomo; it is not “beyond,” to pick up on Daniel Bell’s
comments.
Maybe theater is difficult to reconcile with pastiche because like parody it has that “still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic.” Whereas film, television, painting, and even writing can easily (or at least fluidly) play empty signifiers off of one another, ecstatically estranged from a referent, theater can never completely eliminate the real from its realm; fill up a stage with video monitors and you still have Willem Dafoe’s real body to contend with, not to mention the materiality of the monitors themselves.
That is not to say theater is inherently stuck at the end of high modernism, only that in its postmodern forms it even more radically has to unravel the act of acting, to more thoroughly resituate the relationship to the real as both signifier and referent than most other arts. We can find pastiche all over the theater this class has looked at so far. In the Wooster Group’s estranged readings of the classical modernists in L.S.D., audio and video clips from the past, and deconstruction of American classics like the Crucible, we have “the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language” but “a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satiric impulse, without laughter.” I don’t think Elizabeth LeCompte was lying to Arthur Miller when she said their use of his play was not a parody; although it is not exactly reverential, is certainly not a revival, L.S.D. also does not seek to reveal the Crucible’s fundamental lie or critique its presuppositions as if it knew better; it wears it rather like a feather boa from a vintage boutique in the Haight, using it as a not quite quaint piece of Americana. Richard Foreman’s sets that collide the objects of many worlds into one collage-like space, Robert Wilson’s apparent resurgence of a nineteenth century idea of Wagnerian Gesamtkuntswerk: the revolution of theatrical pastiche is a sort of escape from the endless coup d’etat of modernist innovation, a simultaneous failure and refusal to innovate, an emptying out of that humanist belief in the progress and liberation of Universal Man which necessitated early twentieth century isms as manifesto-driven attempts to demolish and replace. The body onstage in a Wilsonian landscape (drawn from Stein), no longer the subject which expresses itself through objects, becomes instead contiguous with them. The real and its representations cease to be in a modernist critical relationship and begin to exist in a relatively equally estranging field of multiple juxtapositions.
Along with pastiche, which depends on a certain loss of center, loss of individualist and rationalist singularity, and therefore loss of a stable structuralist signifier-signified-referent relationship, Wilson’s schizophrenia (artistic, not personal, don’t forget) rediscovers in words their materiality precisely by forgetting their meaning, by removing them from a one-to-one relationship with the objects and people on stage. If you extend Baudrillard’s use of the automobile as exemplar and metaphor for the increasing postmodern isolation of subjectivities and the loss of public space (as well as private space, which depends for its privacy on a sense of public space to remain secret from), Wilson’s sound—whether Philip Glass or Tom Waits—is the car radio, his words the words of old songs more musical and material than meaningful. Wilson himself has put his theater more or less this way; he said in an interview somewhere (I forget where or when) that his theater is like driving in a car, watching the fields of grass sway in the wind, and listening to Mozart: sometimes there seem to be interesting echoes between sound and image, but only accidentally and temporarily. The space-time of automobile culture, the ballet of cars on the freeway, each driver no longer radically independent but made into a computer by her participation and organization of her isolated space within larger networks, is a near perfect expression of postmodern space-time; it renders the public space of the train an example of modernism’s obsolete linearity. The automobile becomes the vessel through which Wilson imagines separate aural and visual fields overlaid; the train, in for example Einstein on the Beach, becomes instead a slow reminder of an age of lesser speeds and direct coherence, a pastiche of modernist universalism.