bossaposbossa, or, Postmodernism as Semiperipheral Symptom

bim
bom	baum
bim bim bom	bim
bim
bom	baum
bim bim bom	bim
bim bim
é só isso meu baião	baum
e não tem mais nada não	bim
o meu coração pediu assim
só	bim
—João Gilberto, "Bim Bom," 1958 1	—Friedrich Achleitner, "baum-bim," 195? 2

WE HAVE EVERY REASON TO BE AGNOSTIC ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE CURRENT configuration of the arts, about their relative importance as well as the constitution of the various art forms themselves. On one hand, the last thing we need in the current critical climate is another millenarian declaration of the decisive end to this or that aesthetic possibility. On the other hand, it does not take a very strong historicism to note that art forms are born and die, that their constitution and social meaning change dramatically over the period of their existence, that an art form may continue to eke out a subsistence even while the social configuration that gave it force has passed into history. And it should not be a particularly radical stance to suggest that literature itself may already have entered this sort of afterlife. This is not to say that people have stopped reading or writing novels and poems, or that they will stop doing so any time soon. Rather, the point is one that those most invested in the value of the literary will be ready to admit: the forms of attention required by the literary object in particular (as opposed to those the novel shares with film or television, or that poetry shares with popular music) no longer come "naturally," even to the class for whom literature is still supposed to be the hegemonic art form. Nor is this to say—far from it—that there is no longer any value in these forms of attention. But very few professional teachers of literature will have failed to note that while the vast majority of their students are able easily to generate insights about film and music—right ones, wrong ones, ideological ones, but nonetheless insights of the appropriate kind—they often fail to follow even the most overt formal cues in a Wordsworth poem, or a novel by Machado de Assis.

What can be said with some certainty is that literature as we know it is of fairly recent origin. In English, the modern sense of "literature" is perhaps a little more than two hundred years old: Dr. Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language defines literature as simply "Learning, skill in letters." ³ For Foucault, literature, "constituted and so designated on the threshold of the modern age," emerges with the nineteenth century—though a retroactively constructed tradition obscures this moment of origin. ⁴ Alain Badiou, who maintains that the age of literature is constituted by the emergence in the poem of problems that philosophy was unable to solve, traces its emergence to Nietzsche. ⁵ Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, along the same lines, isolate a certain "eidaesthetic" or philosophical-artistic hybridity as the essence of the literary, tracing the origins of literature not to Nietzsche, but to the fragment form used by Friedrich Schlegel at the turn of the nineteenth century. ⁶ Whatever the case, this "eidaesthetic" vocation has not existed uniformly throughout the history of the literary; rather, it has seemed to be taken up most strongly in periods of political crisis and Utopian possibility. Without going into details, we might point to the relationship between Romanticism and the reorganization of feudal space in the wake of the French Revolution, between modernism and the political possibilities that opened up in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and between the heroic phase of postcolonial literature and the great anti-colonial revolutions, particularly in Africa.

To this series we might add a fourth movement, more diffuse and contrary in tendency to the first three. This would be the shutting...