Sorry to have gone on too long about this book (Postmodern Pooh,
Crews)... and talked about postmodernism itself. After this post, I will
not mention Pooh again.
But I have just finished it... reread it even. I also actually searched
for the footnote citations and found every single one. As one reviewer
correctly put it, these people are all "barking mad."
Anyone interested in the nature of criticism, or who just wants to see a
few pompous figures skewered on their own prose, please pick it up (40
bucks Canadian, grumble).
I was reading it on the weekend with kids on Niagara and later Lake
Ontario.
It ain't as funny as the "Yes, Prime/Minister" books BBC released, it's
more subtle than that.
But I think it should be required reading and testing before another
prof gets tenure. "Do you see the errors of their writing styles?"
Failure to comprehend the humor would, of course, mean denial of tenure.
Here are my two fave parts... (though Orpheus Bruno's "The Importance of
Being Portly" is also a gem of satire.)
First...
The seminal paper of Carla Gulag, "The Fissured Subject: Historical
Problematics, the Absolute Cause, Transcoded Contradictions, and
Late-Capitalist Metanarrative (in Pooh)" (undoubtedly a piece included
in Rethinking Marxism").
Carla clearly adores Frederic Jameson -- who is, she says, Christ and
Christopher Robin all rolled into one.
We can only steel ourselves to wait… for the inevitable
emergence of a new international proletariat that will
be markedly more unified and militant than the last.
This will happen, of course; it is History’s plan. As
Enrique Dussel points out in a book co-edited by Jameson,
"The globalizing world-system reaches a limit with the
exteriority of the alterity of the Other, a locus of
'resistance’ from whose affirmation the process of the
negation of negation of liberation begins."
Thus we must regard Late Capitalism and its cultural
offspring, postmodernism, as positive and necessary
mutations of the Monopoly Stage. But if so, there is an
important corollary to be taken to heart by Marxist
cultural workers here and now. We need to stop resisting
postmodern corporatism and its packaged pleasures – no,
better, we need to help them along, secure in our
knowledge that we are thereby greasing History’s rails.
As you might expect, once again Fred Jameson can be
found far ahead of the curve. It is time, he shows, for
Marxists to climb down from their rickety barricades and
cultivate "a specific enjoyment of the potentialities of
the material body."
Look at the progress he himself has already made:
I write as a relatively enthusiastic consumer of
postmodernism...: I like the architecture and a lot of
the newer visual work, in particular the newer
photography. The music is not bad to listen to, or the
poetry to read; ... subgeneric nattatives [of the
novel] are very good, indeed. ... Food and fashion
have also greatly improved, as has the life world
generally.
As this last sentence implies, it’s not enough to indulge
our eyes and ears; we should also be out there on the front
lines buying postmodern merchandise. So much the better if
it has been produced by alienated multinational labor,
subsistence wages, denuded tropical forests, mergered
corporatist cunning, offshore laundered finance, and
cross-border ruses of hedged arbitrage and import-duty
evasion.
All of those practices must gain momentum in prepartion for
the coming proletarian explosion. Instead of sitting around
reading a tame modernist text like Pooh, then, a good
postmodern Marxist might want to log on to the Toys “R” Us
Web site and order a vertically integrated Disney knockoff
such as a My Interactive Pooh(TM) or a Bounce Around
Tigger(TM).
The only stipulation that Fred places on Late Capitalist
pleasures is that they be “Allegorical: -- that is, "able
to stand as a figure for the transformation of social
relations as a whole." His classic examples – set forth in
Postmodernism… -- is the delight that can be had on the
elevators and escalators of a postmodern hotel like the
Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles.
Even a hotel, Fred discovered, can harbor a teasing
Political Unconscious that invites us to loosen up and live
a little. It had never previously come to my notice that
elevators and escalators, those "dialectical opposites," as
Fred says, zip us back and forth so "breathtakingly and
even alarmingly" that we can’t even find the interior
boutiques.
That’s why – and here comes the allegorical part – "the
commercial tenants are in despair and all the merchandise
is marked down to bargain prices."
Surely that is a foretaste of the coming worldwide crash
that will be so gratifying. I propose that you yourselves,
instead of rushing off this afternoon to the Madonna Studies
No-Host Cash Bar, try some allegorical escalating and
elevating right here in the Washington Hilton.
The Revolution expects no less of you. ¡Venceremos!
I have never enjoyed the escalator more, since reading this. I now
realize the revolutionary nature of it, and my assistance of the
revolution in riding it and looking smugly upon the other riders, they
not knowing they draw the revolution nigh.
And here is another fave, from the gynocritic, Sisera Catheter:
Kanga fits perfectly, for example, with the French
feminists’ unanimous conclusion that "all women are neurotic"
and have been so for "thousands of years"; that up till now
our whole gender has shown itself to be "temperamental,
incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious"; [Irigaray] and that
we’ve been out of sync with linear chronological time,
incapable of handling money or property, and maladapted to
any investigation of male-defined reality."
These are hard lessons to absorb, but once we and Kanga have
accepted them, men can’t do any further damage to our
self-respect.
With friends like these, who needs Bush?
Viva le Pooh libre!
Ken.
--
I may not deserve to be remembered as a poet, but surely as
a soldier in the battle for human freedom.
-- Heinrich Heine
