The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary

Poststructuralism and/as Postmodernism

37 Spectral Circumventions (of the Specter) CHAPTER TWO Spectral Circumventions (of the Specter) Poststructuralism, Derrida, and the Project Renewed WALTER: Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos. —Joel and Ethan Coen, The Big Lebowski Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not here, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question “where?” “where tomorrow?” “whither?” —Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx So Rorty has, as I said, a delicate operation on his hands. —John D. Caputo, “On Not Circumventing the Quasi-Transcendental” Poststructuralism and/as Postmodernism Although many critics view poststructuralism and thus deconstruction as a distinctly postmodern and/or nihilistic form of theoretical discourse, commentators who wish to situate it in a much broader philosophical tradition typically reaffirm poststructuralism as a distinctly French discourse, a discourse that is not entirely sympathetic to the pragmatism of (American) postmodernism. Pointing to the (albeit, latent) remainders of phenomenology and structuralism within poststructuralism, commentators like Tilottama Rajan and Rodolphe 37 38 The Passing of Postmodernism Gasché1 tend to disrupt the possibility of sustaining a sense of easy parallelism: modernism/structuralism, postmodernism/poststructuralism . Moreover, what North American critics tend to understand as “poststructuralism”—a term, we should note, that is rarely employed in the discourse it describes (i.e., the texts of Barthes, Kristeva, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, etc.)—typically focuses on a distinctly French “contemporary scene” that is more aligned with the avant-gardist tendencies of high-modernism than with the postmodern confusion of mass and high culture. And when poststructuralists do address (or rather, “celebrate”) English cultural production, they almost always focus on modernist texts. Rarely does poststructuralism bother with postmodern works; it’s difficult—if not impossible—to say what, exactly, “poststructuralists ” know about (American) postmodern cultural production. Did Derrida know his Pynchon? Had Barthes read Philip K. Dick? What does Kristeva think of Pulp Fiction? Did Foucault manage to get in a screening of Stuntman? Of course, this lack of engagement shouldn’t surprise us. During what we might retrospectively view as the height of postmodernism (i.e., the mid-1980s), Andreas Huyssen argued that poststructuralism should be viewed as a “modern” discourse—or rather, as “a theory of modernism” (Huyssen 207). Almost completely forgotten in current discussions of poststructuralism and postmodernism, Huyssen’s line of reasoning opens up the possibility that, “rather than offering a theory of postmodernism and developing an analysis of contemporary culture, French theory provides us primarily with an archeology of modernity, a theory of modernism at the stage of its exhaustion” (209). Poststructuralism is a modernist discourse because it tends to privilege modernist texts as objects of study: “Flaubert, Proust and Bataille in Barthes; Nietzsche and Heidegger, Mallarmé in Derrida; Nietzsche, Magritte and Bataille in Foucault; Mallarmé and Lautréamont, Joyce and Artaud in Kristeva; Freud in Lacan; Brecht in Althusser and Macherey , and so on ad infinitum” (208–9). By privileging such texts, or so the argument goes, poststructuralism works to reinscribe the rather politically hegemonic “art for art’s sake” formalism of high modernism: “the list of ‘no longer possibles’ (realism, representation, subjectivity, history, etc., etc.) is as long in poststructuralism as it used to be in modernism, and it is very similar indeed” (Huyssen 136). Admittedly, it is rather hard to contest the claim that, in poststructuralism , “The enemies still are realism and representation, mass culture and standardization, grammar, communication, and the presumably all-powerful homogenizing pressures of the modernist state” (Huyssen 208). Nevertheless, because it highlights the way in which poststructuralism can be read at the height of postmodern cultural pro- 39 Spectral Circumventions (of the Specter) duction as implicitly sympathetic to modernism, Huyssen’s discussion inadvertently locates the spectral remainder of modernity that is the motivating feature of both poststructuralism and postmodernism. For this reason, a careful look at Huyssen’s perhaps “dated” position will be of some interest. Huyssen wants to argue that poststructuralism continues to resist modernization—and is, for that reason, a remnant (or, better, a revenant) of modernism. For Huyssen, though, this resistance paradoxically speaks to a certain complicity with the ongoing processes of modernization. In direct contrast to the various and...