Reads like teen spirit: Australian Grunge Fiction

It’s difficult to listen to Nirvana without hearing omens of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Suicide floods songs, and other art forms, with meanings that explain the emotions and symbols in song lyrics, in the way the song is sung, in its timbres and tempo. Jim Morrison from the Doors – an accidental death, or overdose – Ian Curtis from Joy Division – suicide by hanging: two figures whose baritonal excursions into the dark side are given an endorsement by their early deaths. This is the End – ahh, of course! Love will tear us apart – chilling, full of foreboding. Listening to and watching Cobain, Morrison and Curtis we feel we can know and feel that they are expressing suicidal emotions and obsessive thoughts of mortality.

It’s hard then to go back to the moment of Nirvana’s global emergence. Back to 1991 and the song Smells like teen spirit. You might remember the video: the band is set up in a high school gym, various subgroups of American teen culture in the bleachers, cheerleaders shaking their pom poms, one with the Anarchy symbol on her top, Kurt Cobain in a striped long sleeved T-shirt his bleached-blonde hair long and stringy, covering his eyes, as the band grind out the heavy verses, moving into overdrive for the anthemic chorus: Here we are now, entertain us. By the video’s end there’s a riot going on: the gym floor has been invaded, the drums are being attacked, and Cobain is screaming ‘No denial’.

It’s an angry song, even one of desperation, but hardly a premonition of suicide. There’s something else going on in that song and I don’t think this something else can be explained by Kurt Cobain’s suicide. In fact, the meanings that we make of songs like Smells like teen spirit might be less guided by the expression of the artist’s soul, and more by our own needs to find a form for making sense of the world we live in. Smells like teen spirit is, I think, a perfect example of a form that helped a mass of people make sense of the world. Not by explaining the world, but more by providing four and a bit minutes of song which performed the feeling of the contradictions of teen spirit.

What do I mean by the feeling of the contradictions of teen spirit? Just a touch of theory by way of explanation. One of the founders of Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams, argued that culture was not only ordinary - that you didn’t need a degree in fine arts to consume it in galleries because culture was how you walked and talked everyday - but that its expressions were structured feelings: or producing a structure of feeling. This is Williams:

“[I]t was a structure in the sense that you could perceive it operating in one work after another which wasn’t otherwise connected – people weren’t learning it from each other; yet it was one of feeling much more than thought – a pattern of impulses, restraints, tones.” [from Politics and letters: Interviews with the New Left, London New Left Books, 1979: 159 ]

What a great way of defining a genre like grunge: ‘ a structure operating in one work after another which wasn’t otherwise connected.’

Smells like teen spirit read this way, as structure of feeling, is an ambivalent text that oscillates between a sludgey spaced-out futility, and a dense, explosive anger that accelerates, then brakes, accelerates again. It veers between slowdown and speed-up: the vocal tone moves from sarcasm to sincerity; a hatred directed both inward and outward and an idealism that is blocked. Lyrically, and more importantly in Cobain’s timbre, is a feeling of abjection, of something debasing that he’s reached deep into himself to eject but can’t - it remains stuck in his throat and belly. A denial, that can’t be blasted out through speed or power.

The lyric of Smells like teen spirit has as its central subject youth culture: the teen spirit that the form of the song is so ambivalent about. The lyric demands that youth culture be about more than entertainment: that was a central promise of rock music, and punk in particular. But in the end, well whatever, Nevermind.

Nirvana try to breathe their teen spirit into one of post-war youth culture’s key forms: the rock song. But here youth as a symbol of speed and revolt is rendered in a deeply ambivalent text that also presents youth culture as a sludge-like state that is too slow and thick to storm the barricades. Let’s trash the gym then go to the mall for a cheeseburger deluxe with fries.

Smells like teen spirit sounds like a last gasp call to arms for a dominant version of youth culture. Has rock progressed since Grunge? I don’t follow the game closely enough anymore, but the song sounds like the last rebellion in the line that runs from the Velvet Underground through the Stooges to Joy Division: Nirvana stage a revolution that is exhausted before it begins.

So, Nirvana’s smells like teen spirit as a structure of feeling – a form of song, a structure with a conventional verse/ chorus/ solo format – that provided a compelling aural text for feeling your way into the world in 1991-92. Grunge becomes a buzzword and a subculture in the West.

In the same year Brisbane based novelist Andrew McGahan writes Praise which is retrospectively nominated as the germinal Australian Grunge novel. Late 1991 is also the time, in Australia, of growing unemployment queues: the aftermath of the recession of 1990. If youth is a key symbol of modernisation, of speed, then what happens to this symbol in a time of slow-down or recession? What happens to teen spirit as an idea, as a feeling, when an economy gets ill and decelerates?

This slow-down in growth was diagnosed, by the newly minted Prime Minister Paul Keating, as being caused by endemic blockages in the economic body. There were clogged, sclerotic arteries in need of clearing so as to get the financial blood flowing quicker. The prescription was for more economic reform: more flexibility, open-ness, youthful vitality.

So, I’ve taken a leap into a strange hybrid of economic and medical discourse here. Not much of a leap when you consider that the current economic crisis – the sub prime crisis based in the US– is often referred to as a contagion that might infect other economies. Bodies that get ill can also be filled with teen spirit and, I’m arguing, these symbols of youth become highly contradictory and problematic in the period of the early to mid 1990s.
This problem emerges in a stream of art and popular culture: grunge – grunge music and grunge fiction. And it emerges with some force because the youthful speed demanded for further economic reform clashes head on with a strain of youth culture that had operated in terms of its own superior cultural and social speed pitting itself against the authority of the state and the commodification of the markets.

What then happens when the state authorises a speed-up in the process of commodification through the symbols of youth? In other words if youth is the symbolic means by which economic modernisation is promoted by politicians like Paul Keating, by the youthful Bill Clinton, then where does teen spirit go to in order to rebel. I think you can hear the sound of this grinding of the gears in Nirvana’s song which speeds up and slows down in turn.

Four years later, in 1995, a new genre of Australian fiction emerged under the name of grunge. Christos Tsiolkas’ short novel, Loaded [adapted as the 1998 film Head On], was one of a number of these novels marketed and debated within a critical literary discourse which tended to interpret these novels as autobiographical and realistic representations of an urban youth culture that was out to shock and that had lost its way. Loaded narrates twentyfour hours in the life of 19 year old Ari Voulis, as he tells us about his journey and experiences through the four corners of suburban Melbourne. A first generation migrant, who is jobless and gay, Ari’s day is fuelled by a constant ingestion of drugs, of masturbation and sex in backlanes and beats, endless fights, flights and refusals, the tentative beginnings of a romance and a soundtrack that accompanies his movements and dancing throughout the city and its places.

The pace of his day matches his main drug choices: speed for acceleration and aggression and marijuana for relaxing and slowing down. His fundamental tone is one of refusal and sarcasm but this is mixed with moments of tenderness and sincerity, especially for his family and his best friend Johnny, a transivestite. His hatred is directed both out and inwardly. And he thrives on abjection, seeking it in sex and also from the insults of his father.

Loaded is a more complex text than Smells like teen spirit, but it too is deeply ambivalent about teen spirit or youth as a symbol. Ari is torn in three directions: a wog who hates wogs, gay but afraid of being identified as a faggot and working-class in a time of residual solidarity. Ari begins the novel waking at his brother’s student share house in East Melbourne, and ends it in the West in his family-home on his bed, exhausted, waiting for sleep. He has moved and danced through the four corners of suburban Melbourne, but hasn’t developed or really gone anywhere. Rather than self-formation Ari’s self is internally split three ways; rather than integrating into the world, Ari thrives on its abject sites and refuses its basic demand: that he get a job and settle down. Although a highly compressed narrative Loaded is a failed coming of age novel: a de-formation novel. It reads like teen spirit in crisis.
So, reading grunge fiction as though it is the expression of authentic adolescent feelings, misses another way of interpreting that reads through structures of feeling, and that reads youth as a symbol rather than as a fact. We can read Kurt Cobain’s suicide into his songs, into his singing performances, but this can’t explain why Nirvana were so timely, so instantly, globally embraced. When grunge is read against a dominant national and international response to recession that speeds up the processes of reform and uses the language of youthfulness to persuade the polity to modernise the economic body, such a reading suggests that what this modernising body abjects or expels enters the symbolic field of youth. Grunge seems like a pretty accurate name for this return of the abject body, during and after a recession. Ari the narrator in Loaded says:

“There is a last, and very cherished, urban myth. That every new generation has it better that the one that came before it. Bullshit. I am surfing on the down-curve of capital. The generations after this one are not going to build on the peasants’ landholdings. There’s no jobs, no work, no factories, no wage packet, no half-acre block. There is no more land. I am sliding towards the sewer. I’m not even struggling against the flow. I can smell the pungent aroma of shit, but I’m still breathing.” (Loaded 144)

Is this teen spirit, or does it just read like it?

[From a paper presented at Utas Postgraduate Conference, 21 September, 2007]

The flexible body politic: fitter and healthier for what?

[An older draft post. Time to let loose].

A couple of quotes from Australian author of fiction and essayist Amanda Lohrey which nail the mode of neoliberalism she detected in sections of late-1980s Sydney culture. For Lohrey 'new age' practices of self-government are displacements of earlier utopian projects. These new technologies of self focus political-libidinal investments in the individual body because that's the last space of controllable shelter and control in a time of radical reform (a term popular in the Australian mainstream media in the 1980s which referred to the privatising and deregulating policies of the Federal Labor Government).

The title of Lohrey's essay is, of course, a reference to Jameson's famous essay, but something like a Foucauldian interest in the technologies of the self and the rationalities of liberalism can be seen in this essay and indeed in the trajectory of Lohrey's fiction, which shifts from the influence of aesthetic Marxisms like Brecht, Lukacs, Benjamin and Bloch's, to, as I say, a Foucauldian interest in the formations of the body and self, and in the forces of the psyche-body circuit acting in relation to social-historical changes. I think, for Lohrey, it is the role of narrative and language too on these more recent interests that make her fiction fascinating and a good resource to write PhD research from.
























Her last two works of fiction The Philosopher's Doll (2004) and Camille's Bread (1995) move more firmly into the territory I'm attempting to describe above, after the more sustained focus on political party (Australian Labor Party) and State-based politics of the first two novels: The Morality of Gentlemen (1984) and The Reading Group (1988). Effectively Lohrey's interest in the poetics of politics, as Jenna Mead describes it, moves from a focus on the governmentality of state to one on the governmentality of the citizen-subject. Is this shift one that can be explained by her sensitivity to new social forms or is it (also, perhaps) a sign of 'the maturing author'?

From ‘The Project of the Self under Late Capitalism’ Australia’s Best Essays, 2001.

What are these new and emergent structures of feeling? This was something that first engaged me when I went to live in Sydney in 1987. . . . a new sensibility was developing that was a portent of how Australia generally might see the world ten or even twenty years from now. As for my Shiatsu practitioners, they differed from the mainstream only in degree not kind. In essence they were fierce materialists who, through a rigorous regimen of diet and physical training aspired to re-invent themselves by reconditioning their material base, the body – if necessary, cell by cell. They aspired to a kind of utopia of the body, and what could be more Australian than that? They were Zen surfers without the waves. (246-7)

Since then I’ve kept a watching brief on the evolution of the idea of the self as a constant work-in-progress and the concomitant growth of what might be described as privatised utopias; the utopia of one. . . . When all is free-floating, unstable, in a process of being dismantled or alienated from you [Z. Bauman’s liquid modernity], what is it you have left? And the answer is: the body. The body itself becomes a utopian site. And the project of the utopian body is primarily about the pragmatics of health, fitness and diets . . . ‘Fitter and healthier for what?’ (248-9)

Reads like Teen Spirit

(Another extract from the revised PhD intro)

Before moving to consider the fourth dominant framework through which Grunge fiction has been received [Grunge as focussed on the theme of abjection], it is worth dwelling on the role that Grunge as musical culture plays in Syson’s influential essay. A shared musical and literary boundary is one that is inscribed into the term Grunge. Yet it rare for the both sides of the boundary to be given a concomitant and serious analysis. Grunge music is often positioned in essays on Grunge fiction as the truly teenage and commodified world against which ‘adult’ cultural forms are contrasted and Grunge is defined as a marketing exercise. To take Grunge music seriously seems, somehow, unthinkable; a boundary not to be crossed. As an initial crossing, Syson’s essay is a good place to start, not least because Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” forms the basis of his title.

Syson despatches Grunge as a cultural term – shared by both literary and musical culture – by fixing its etymology to the “sentimental teen spirit” that Nirvana express (21). He has no interest in considering Grunge as a term for a cultural movement that encompasses both musical and literary form for reasons to do with the teenage-ness of Grunge music and the fundamental incommensurability of pop/rock musical and literary form:

At the 1995 Melbourne writers’ festival, Linda Jaivin made a point in the session on Grunge that might have laid the label to rest. She asked, “But what is Grunge in the literary context?” Maybe it’s a bit like trying to work out what the difference is between realist and modernist electric guitar solos – the question doesn’t make any sense. (21)

On the surface the incommensurability of Grunge musical and literary form is prefigured into the analogy that Syson chooses to underline his point. But this apparent disjunction is based on a romantic discourse of musical form in which all rock music is understood as expressive of subjective authenticity: whether it be teenage or African-American alienation and rebellion. The distinction Syson is unable to voice is that between Fordist and post-Fordist electric guitar solos; between the guitar solos that made sense during the period Zygmunt Bauman characterises as heavy capitalism and solid modernity – Fordism, and that of light capitalism and liquid modernity – post-Fordism. Indeed, one way to characterise the electric guitar solo heard in Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen Spirit” is to hear it as both imitative of the vocal melody – and thereby expressively realist, because imitating the lyrical song – and to hear it as post-Fordist, because while it is sonically redolent of overdriven Chicago Blues solos, and hence alluding to rock’s Fordist period, it is also treated with chorus and phase-shifting effects, which take the solid and heavy Fordist timbres and bent blues notes and liquefy and lighten them. Difficult to hear is the sustained final note of the guitar solo which is held through the beginning of the final verse. This last section of the guitar solo morphs from its imitation of the vocal melody into an electronic pulse that becomes spectral and ethereal. In one guitar solo Kurt Cobain offers a rich aural text, moving from Fordist realism into an uncertain and haunted post-Fordist timbre and sonics. Read and heard together with the musical video and the lyrics, “Smells like Teen Spirit” is a complex work of art that combines situationist politics in its video and a form of punk-Adorno-esque negation in its lyric and vocal grain. Nirvana are both expressing teen spirit and attempting to get outside it, to negate it and turn its commodified conditions from a spectacle into a situation.

The hermeneutics of Grunge musical culture and form is a curious aspect in the reception of Grunge fiction. Syson’s disavowal of Grunge as a musical form signifying anything except sentimental teen spirit appears to be based on a misreading of Nirvana’s signature song, which he parodies in his essay’s title. His suggestive claim that Australian Grunge fiction is a literary response to the demolition of structures of feelings in Australian political culture, closes its ears to similar demolitions of structures of feeling being responded to in American musical culture. Is Grunge fiction also post-Fordist and practising negation to attempt to move outside a teen spirit that is corrupt, no longer a source of radicalism or resistance? What social and political forms are the equivalent of Fordism in Australia? If Fordism was an historic compromise between male manufacturing wage earners and the owners of industries like Ford, then how did the historic compromises function in Australia? What was happening to these compromises, or settlements, in the period when Grunge fiction took shape?

Capturing lives in liquid modern times

The Necks performing LAW [pdf file of performance poster]













Ross Gibson’s essay ‘The Rise of Digital Multimedia’ in Cultural Studies Review (12:1 Mar 2006) sets out a useful and brief thumbnail sketch of two moments in the historical sociology of cultural forms which he uses to buttress his claim that his co-composed digital multimedia project Life After Wartime (LAW) is perhaps a cultural form suited to our transnational-globalized moment.

The first moment in the history of cultural forms for Gibson, Ian Watt’s 1957 The Rise of the Novel is ‘a classic of cultural history’, whereby

In seeking to understand why the novel emerged so quickly and with so much influence during the early eighteenth century, Watt started from the premise that artistic forms often mimic the psychological, social, and political conditions prevalent in the particular era that gives rise to them. He contended that early novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding developed literary techniques for dramatising the emergence of the bourgeois individual, with its private sensibility, its responsibility to create opportunities for itself and its need for self-reflective interior monologues with which to access the relationship between self and the world.(141-2)

For Gibson, following Watt, the study of new cultural forms like the novel affords ‘insight into periods of psychic, political and philosophical flux.’

‘Cultural forms tend to get invented and become popular at exactly the time they are needed.’(142)

Next Gibson, rightly I think, argues that the novel’s capacity to perform the work that it did for reading publics in the c18 and c19 became exhausted perhaps because of the limits of its potential to innovate being reached, but more importantly because it was superseded by the kinetic cultural medium of cinema, which was better equipped and suited to mimick the experience of urban modernity and its time-space compression:

With the machine age and the urban explosion it caused, the modern world was being newly defined by the way energy was expressed urgently within a newly compressed world of speedy, mechanical rhythm. And cinema mimicked this shift in impetus.(143)

If for Gibson the novel’s emergence occurs alongside that of the Western Bourgeois individual-self, and it’s forms of privacy/ private property (following Benedict Anderson in his Imagined Communities nationalism should really be added to the social-forms that Gibson lists as emerging with the novel), then the emergence of cinema accompanies that of the social masses and the c20 national-popular nationalisms:

Consider Australia circa 1901, at the inauguration of the federal government: cinema enabled people in Gympie, Sydney and Adelaide, let’s say, to share a perceptual and a conceptual frame where they had previously been dissociated. (143)

So, Gibson argues that these cultural forms are reflective of and help to create ways of making sense of the epochs in which they are put to work:

But cinema has its limits. Understanding this, we can start contemplating the rise of digital multimedia systems in our own era. A definitive characteristic of the movies is the way they ‘lock off’ their several dynamic parts into a final version, the ‘release print’. This ultimate inflexibility of cinema is similar to the way most national-scale communities responded to the turbulence of modernity by insisting that their societies first synchronise energetically to the machine world and then stabilise permanently once the new political state was realised. (143-4)

As cinema is to nationalism, DM (Digital multimedia) is for transnationalism (or globalisation) because DM is unfinished, not locked off ‘explicitly provisional’(144).Gibson:

Because of the dynamics of its file structures and the integrating, evolving codes that get applied to those files, any digital multimedia configuration is a contentious event in a continuous process rather than a completed, content-full object; it is always ready to be dismantled and reassembled into new alignments as soon as the constituent files have been federated in response to momentary prevailing ‘world conditions’. (144-5 emphasis added)

Digital Multimedia (DM) then, in this case Gibson's collaborative project Life After Wartime (LAW), is a form for our transnational-globalised moment, or so Gibson argues.
LAW:

Responding to an extraordinary collection of crime scene photographs belonging to the New South Wales Police, LAW is a ‘story-engine’ or speculative ‘conjunction-machine’ that restlessly combines still images plus haiku-like texts plus musical sound files plus stimulus from the interactive user. The original archive is a jumble of evidence associated with actual people who have been caught in painfully real outbreaks of fate, desire or rage. (145)

The conclusive texts (verdicts, prosecution and defence case etc) are withheld. The ‘user’ is operating as an 'investigator', rather than 'reader or receiver': to engage is to compose with found materials. Encouraging ‘a forensic rhythm in the imagination, the intellect, the spirit.’ (147)

While it's interesting and even persuasive that he invokes something like a polyrhythmic function for DM, I find the social-historical homology between the form of this multimedia and our putative transnational moment to be undertheorised: that the effects of 'transnational-globalisation' might be experienced unevenly, that glocalization might be experienced as time-space de-compression, or that the forms of DM might be what we use to solve or live with a contradiction, or to provide a means of living with asynchronies - all these considerations are not entertained by Gibson's essay.

I want to come at this issue of form-history another way. Two Australian novels published last year, Andrew Hutchinson’s Rohypnol and Malcolm Knox’s Jamaica portray a hyper-masculinized ruling class (and its nouveau bourgeois contestant) whose power is not practised solely in the exercise of accumulated cultural capital, nor completely in their use of financial capital, but rather their class dominance resides in the practice and capacity to control time-space: to be able to evade capture - to not get caught - when Others are after you (effectively to compress time-space, to fly out at a moment’s notice); and inversely to decompress time-space: to languidly luxuriate in the opulent no-places of resort cultures and the entertainment fortresses of private homes.

These sociological concepts are from Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity:

Domination consists in one's own capacity to escape, to disengage, to 'be elsewhere', and the right to decide the speed with which all that is done - while simultaneously stripping the people on the dominated side of their ability to arrest or constrain their moves or slow them down. The contemporary battle for domination is waged between forces armed, respectively, with the weapons of acceleration and procrastination . . .Light modernity let one partner out of the cage. 'Solid' modernity was an era of mutual engagement. 'Fluid' modernity is the epoch of disengagement, elusiveness, facile escape and hopeless chase. In 'liquid modernity', it is the most elusive, those free to move without notice, who rule.(120)

Now, Gibson's historical sociology of cultural form - here DM - would seem to be only a celebration of transnational-globalisation (also cosmopolitanism) rather than also being a critique of its rationalities. And yet the dominant operational genre of LAW is investigation: piecing together (or what J Attali in Noise names the fourth order of musicking - composition) narratives from fragments of text, photographs etc. The goal or game here is to generate assemblages composed of technique, evidence, narrative, hunch, hypotheses, mood so as to catch or nab the perpetrators of the crimes these archival photos from 1945-60, and archival text, are evidence for and in.

Is the operational goal, then, of LAW (investigating and generating a narrative of a crime, using DM) to provide us with, potentially, the skills of capture in a liquid modern globe? If getting caught is a crime in neoliberalism then playing the LAW-game might help us develop both the formal skills of composing captures, but also of making evasions.

Debating postmodernism and postmodernity

Who are you talking (back) to? What's this address? What are the (inter- or) con-texts of this debate, this diagreement, this conversation?



In debates about postmodernism's genealogy, its meaning, its designs on curriculum in High School education, I think the first questions that need to be asked are those above. So, here I'm writing back to an essay published on Adrienswords blog May 22, 2007 'Postmodernism is/not a dirty word'. This writing back is also in anticipation of a promised subsequent essay from Adrien on related issues; in particular a diagnosis of contagions in Humanities discourse, especially the viral influence of the needless complexity of Judith Butler's writing.



Firstly some positions. I come to this debate after having been a dismissive skeptic on the value of postmodernism. Not having understood what this term meant, its genealogy and various definitions, I had swallowed an empiricist - Old Left - view (Boris Frankel's in From the Prophets the deserts come -1992). In this definition postmodernism was a theory and practice of writing in which language is posited as being as close to reality as human-beings got. Language is reality. This assertion is more properly one of structuralism or poststructuralism, although there is considerable crossover between these various 'isms' and schools of writing.


Having taken an Arts degree at UNSW in the 1990s, majoring in Australian and postcolonial literatures, literary criticism and literary theory, I was exposed to poststructuralist ideas much more than postmodern ones. This makes sense, as it was compulsory to take a semester of Linguistics in first year, and the compulsory literary theory component was centred on first learning the methodology of structuralist analaysis, then post-structuralism. In hindsight my interest in Marty Heidegger's Being and Time, was a response to the desire to anchor the groundless methodology of structuralist analysis into the finitude of death. That such an anchoring has problems, mostly arising from its individualism, was something that encountering Marxist philosophies of history has helped to solve. Walter Benjamin's Messianic time, as the 'time' at-in [prepositions start to break down at this point!], the whole of history is redeemed, enables a way into thinking the finitude of Heidegger's being-toward-death as social.


However, its no longer 1994 and after a hiatus I have returned to University - UTas - to complete a doctorate in recent Australian Literature. The second book my supervisor advised me to read was Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism:or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Further on I also read David Harvey's The condition of postmodernity. An essay that's influenced my thinking on these matters is by John Frow 'What was post-modernism' from Time and commodity culture, and the writing of Zygmunt Bauman in his 'liquid modern' (see Liquid modernity) phase has profoundly shaped my thinking about periodisations, and about how the post- in post-modernism, or post-modernity, is merely a marker for a new, or different, type or phase, of modernity. Thus for Bauman, the shift in recent times has been from solid to liquid modernity, from heavy to light capitalism. While Bauman is attempting, successfully I think, to address a wide public through this simple conceptual schema, his writing is conceptually dense, and leavened with illustrations and citations. But the suasive force of his intervention (replacing post- with liquid -) can be seen in the connotations this term has in the language of our times: financial liquidity, global flows, mobility and flexibility. It won't have gone unnoticed that Bauman alludes to Marx's poetic image of capitalist-modernity: all that is solid melts into the air.



This is a Marxist-influenced list of texts on modernism, modernity and what comes after. And this is what I think needs to be spelled out in this debate: that for these writers postmodernity is descriptive and their work attempts to explain and critique this descriptive. Far from the commonplace view, that postmodernism is a viral normative project, I'd like to emphasis the critiques and attacks on postmodernity, on the normative postmodernism(s), that these thinkers and writers made and make.


Still, there is confusion here and this sense of misunderstanding is due to questions in the field of the philosophy of history. These questions are very rarely posed in the mainstream media, because thinking about time and history is so ingrained and normalized. Indeed, while we might read about developing nations, or the Western tradition, the Enlightenment, even modernity, in the MSM, what are we talking of precisely when these phrases appear? Was there one Enlightenment? Or is Enlightenment an attitude, manifesting an operation of thought whereby we can say that Enlightenment thought is like religious thought, it is a specific practice rather than a period that forever changed how and what we think and practice. Or, take the commonplace terms of developing and developed nations. This historicism sets up a teleological shape to human history which is also universal: all nations are, or aspire to be, heading in the same direction: liberal-democratic-capitalist (to take the most obvious example of this form of historicism from the post-1989 period).

Some fragments to be expanded on later:

But the keyterm here is modern and its extensions: modern-ism and modern-ity. In order to beigin to understand the post- versions of this word, we first need to focus on its root.



One assumption in this debate-conversation is that the only value of a discourse on/of postmodernism/ity centres on Secondary Education and the teaching of disciplines in the Liberal Arts/Humanities. This assumption is not unwarrented, but can easily limit the debate to the sorts of terms and understandings that 'Parents' claim as their right.


Similarly, if your understanding of the politics of postmodernism-ity comes out of Camille Paglia then you've no real claim to be setting yourself up as an expert on the arguments of those engaged in the discourse surrounding postmodernism-ity. Again we come to philosophy of history. And from my reading of those who are influenced by this [i.e Paglia and such] culture war polemic style of writing-thinking, the concept of history promoted is one of dualistic spiritual battle (eros vs thanatos, or Apollonian vs Dionysian), or biology vs culture contest.




Another set of problems:

a. The history of cultural studies - here, Peter Osborne in his The Politics of Time [see link in sidebar], makes a vital link in the chain, when he asserts that Cultural Studies is a/one political legacy of Surrealism (p185);

b. The history of English as a discipline;

c. The disciplinary methods-boundaries: the ethnographic claims of cultural studies, the close-reading and critical claims of literary criticism/English.