Zurbrugg - The Parameters of Postmodernism

So many books have been written about postmodern culture that it may seem imprudent to add to their number. On the other hand, so many studies of the cultural climate of the last half century narrowly dwell upon the alleged postmodern crisis in Europe and America that it is time for the wider parameters of postmodernism to be identified.

This book takes as its starting point the hypothesis that the present tendency to define postmodern culture negatively, in terms of schizophrenia, superficiality, and so forth, derives from overliteral and undercritical responses to some of the more seductive overstatements by European theorists such as Benjamin, Barthes, Burger, Baudrillard, Bonito-Oliva, and Bourdieu. It identifies this tendency with the B-effect mythology or the apocalyptic register informing most European and American writings on postmodernism.

The morbid enthusiasm of B-effect converts obsessed with the apparent neutrality, decline, stagnation, submonumentality, and general obsolescence of creativity in present times is decidedly symptomatic of one facet of the postmodern mentality. So indeed are the pages of National Enquirer, Mad, and Vanity Fair. Flatearthers have also had their day and may well live to do so once again. Nevertheless, other more rewarding facets of postmodern culture also exist, and if so many cartographers of postmodern creativity fail to perceive them, then, as the American performance artist Laurie Anderson suggests, this is perhaps because theyre looking for it in the wrong place. In Andersons terms, for anyone to say that creativity is dead just says that this particular person is creatively dead.

As this book attempts to demonstrate, the literary and artistic temper of the postmodern condition in Europe and America cannot adequately be understood unless one complements B-effect generalizations with the more positive implications of the innovative creative practices that I associate with the C-effect characterizing the multimedia experiments of the American composer John Cage and other avant-garde artists.

In America these artists include Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Yvonne Rainer, and Robert Wilson; in Europe, technological artists such as the sound poet Henri Chopin, the telematics pioneer Roy Ascott, and the kinetic and electronic artists documented in Frank Poppers memorable Electra exhibition at the Paris Muse dArt Moderne in 1983. A second European variant of the C-effect informs the ways in which artists and writers such as Umberto Eco, Gnter Grass, Christa Wolf, Joseph Beuys, and Heiner Mller all attempt to negotiate the future by combining more traditional past and present discourses. The collaborations between Heiner Mller and Robert Wilson offer particularly striking evidence of the ways in which current cultural traditions now transcend temporal, geographical, verbal, ideological, and technological borders.

These pages are written very much in the spirit of the far-flung intertextuality that Anna Balakian has associated with my earlier work, offering a succession of strategic deliberations upon what I sense to be the most telling contradictions within B-effect scholarship and the most exciting innovations within C-effect creativity.

Hopefully they will encourage the reader to look beyond the platitudes of B-effect accounts of postmodern culture and to consider present practices in a more critical and discriminating manner. Throughout this book I have attempted to refer directly to primary rather than secondary material, and I base much of the latter part of my argument upon my own interviews with the artists and writers in question. Postmodern culture requires empirical analysis.

. Laurie Anderson, interview with author, 8 June 1991.

. Anna Balakian, review of Dada Spectrum: The Dialectics of Revolt, ed. Stephen C.Foster and Rudolf E.Kuenzli (Madison, Wis.: Coda, 1979), LEsprit Crateur 20.3 (Fall 1980): 99.