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TEN THE AGONY OF UNRECOGNITION Raymond Federman and Postmodern Theory Eric Dean Rasmussen In “Before Postmodernism and After,” Raymond Federman admits “quite frankly” that he—like virtually all commentators on postmodernism, including fellow fiction writers to whom the “postmodern” tag was applied—“never understood what Postmodernism was,” “what it meant,” or “how it functioned ” (1993, 107).1 Federman’s ostensibly limited understanding, however, doesn’t prevent him from writing a two-part essay devoted to “burying Postmodernism,” an essay advancing several bold hypotheses, beginning with the proposition that postmodernism “changed tense on December 22, 1989, with the death of Samuel Beckett” and concluding with an antithetical speculation: Federman’s essay may in fact be “yet another postmodern text” (105, 133). A tonal shift registers the argumentative turn. What begins as a somber deposition—the depositing of a body of postmodern works into academia’s archives (which, as Jacques Derrida taught us, too frequently serve merely as a kind of mnemonic crypt, to be exhumed by scholarly “cryptographers” who decode the remains entombed there) a funerary rite to mark postmodernism’s passing that will displace it from its culturally preeminent position—turns out, by the essay’s open-ended ending, to be a remarkably joyful exposition (a “discourse or an example of it designed to convey information about what is difficult to understand” and “a public exhibition or show,” one might attend at a fair or an amusement park [Merriam -Webster’s Online Dictionary http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/exposition]): 159 160 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS “Let us admit that Postmodernism was a great fun adventure,” Federman declares as his whirlwind exposition winds down. Even for readers familiar with the archival material, Federman’s numerous digressions are dizzying, but as he informs us, “that is exactly what Postmodernism did: it disoriented” (Federman 1993, 133, 125).2 But Federman’s use of the past tense is deceptive. It’s not that there’s no exit, but upon departing from the archives—assembled from textual fragments by Barthes and Beckett, Derrida and Diderot, Foucault and Federman, and other writers (mostly, but not exclusively from the latter half of the twentieth century) whose transformative texts unsettle the boundary between creative (fictional) and critical (theoretical) writing—we discover that “the entire universe . . . has become Postmodern,” thanks in part to forces “set in motion” by the artifacts archived therein (107–8). Thus, the penultimate postmodern exhibit (to continue the hyperreal-world-as-theme-park trope made famous by Jean Baudrillard3 ) turns out to be remarkably present; it’s the very text we’re reading. Demonstrating himself to be, like Paul de Man or Stanley Fish, a “master of the critical peripetia, by which the conclusion of the essay turns upon and undermines its own arguments” (Lodge 2002, 105), Federman stages, via a postmortem account of postmodernism’s demise, a rebirth of postmodern textuality: it is born again as a “critifiction,” a “narrative that contains its own theory and even its own criticism”—hence the exuberant affect (Federman 1993, 33). Federman is celebrating the regenerative power of “incest-uality,” his neologism for composing texts through the promiscuous use of intertextual citations, often unattributed and ripped from his own previous publications (120). Federman’s archival essay affirms Derrida’s observation that the form in which we archive and preserve material shapes its perceptible content, which conditions how the material will be processed and hence understood by those who later access the archives: “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event” (Derrida 1996, 17). Federman endows postmodern writing with life “now” in the fleeting present so that it might remain alive in the future, and his “frank” admission of non-knowledge serves as a pretext for an elaborate “presentation” of postmodern writing’s many paradoxes. Perhaps the biggest paradox is how productive postmodernism’s hyper-skepticism has proven to be since its emergence in the late 1950s as the West’s predominant cultural sensibility. Postmodernism emerged as “A Supreme Indecision” prompted by anxiety, doubt, and distrust about the possibility of progress in the postwar, “POST-EXISTENTIALIST ERA,” a period marked by a series of crises. In Federman’s account—told and retold in eight polemical pieces published between 1973 and 1993 and collected in Critifiction: Postmodern Essays—these negative affects prompted writers to [3.133.144.217] Project MUSE...

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