The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary

From an Ethics of Perversity to an Ethics of Indecision

89 Writing of the Ghost (Again) ological promise, or spectral possibility, that it sought to undermine finally, that it sought to expose as absolutely immaterial. Like Derrida’s later work—which attempts to account for the inevitability of a certain spectral compulsion, which seeks to embrace the specter by denying neither its immateriality (as modernism did) nor its materiality (as postmodernism ultimately seemed to do)—Leyner’s work stresses and embraces the necessity of the spectral promise; it reaffirms a certain faith in the possibility of the impossible. In this sense, Leyner’s work is less an example of “late postmodernism” than it is a literary manifestation of “renewalism.” What I’m suggesting is that Leyner’s work— particularly as it is exemplified in Tetherballs—speaks to an emergent narrative strategy, a strategy that abandons the increasingly nihilistic (or, we might say, suicidal) trajectory of postmodern metafiction while simultaneously and perhaps paradoxically embracing the postmodern rejection of a distinctly modernist form of idealism. We might then say that a “renewalist” work like Leyner’s rejects what Slavoj Žižek critiques as the celebration of absolute “perversity”—which is to say, tentatively and somewhat crudely, that renewalist forms of narrative can be read as, what Žižek has termed, the “art of the ridiculous sublime.” From an Ethics of Perversity to an Ethics of Indecision In his extended discussion of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Žižek argues that “the art of the ridiculous sublime,” as exemplified in Lynch’s films, is neither a “cold postmodern exercise” nor a “New Age” affirmation of “a subconscious Life Energy” uniting all events and experiences. Highlighting the fact that Lynch is associated with both positions—that is, some view him as “the ultimate deconstructionist ironist” while others insist that his work seriously exposes “a Jungian universal subconscious spiritualized libido” (3)—Žižek exposes the way in which a film like Lost Highway can be taken seriously if we understand that its “ ‘seriousness ’ does not signal a deeper spiritual level underlying superficial clichés, but rather a crazy assertion of the redemptive value of naïve clichés as such” (3). As Žižek suggests, “The enigma of this coincidence of opposites is . . . the enigma of ‘postmodernity’ itself” (3). But, for Žižek, this is the enigma of a “postmodernity” that, if we borrow a line from Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, does not “fall prey to any kind of ‘post-modernist’ traps” (7). One of these postmodernist traps, it would seem, is the trap of textual “perversity.” Associated specifically with the absolute contingency of a “cyberspace notion of hypertext” (36), Žižek’s “perversity” can be understood as unchecked 90 The Passing of Postmodernism textual play: “the pervert’s universe is the universe of the pure symbolic order, the signifier’s game running its course, unencumbered by the Real of human finitude . . . a universe without closure, unencumbered by the inertia of the Real” (36). In a manner that recalls the logo centrism identified by Taylor, the perverse text refuses closure absolutely only to inadvertently “enact a proto-ideological denial” (36). Through the filter of Lacan, Žižek explains the paradox of the “perverse” postmodern text like this: The paradox is that this ultimately helpless confusion, this lack of final orientation, far from causing an unbearable anxiety, is oddly reassuring: the very lack of a final point of closure serves as a kind of denial which protects us from confronting the trauma of our finitude, of the fact that our story has to come to an end at some point. (37) The answer, or “cure,” for these false acts of subversion is, Žižek insists, the type of textual negotiation we see in the work of a director like Lynch. Instead of texts that simply abandon the Real as impossible—as nothing more than the effect of an always contingent symbolic order— Žižek thus endorses a type of enigmatic postmodernism that refuses closure within the horizon of the impossible Real, which Žižek repeatedly associates with the unspeakable nature of certain traumatic events. According to Žižek, such texts, in typical postmodern fashion, endorse the “reality” of an infinite number of discursive perspectives (or, as Kenneth Burke might put it, “terministic screens”) while simultaneously highlighting the fact that each of those perspectives is confined by, or faced with, an ultimately unrepresentable truth or end: “the endlessly repeated reenactments refer to...