RE: Reading the Postmodern by Robert David Stacey

Author:Robert David Stacey [Stacey, Robert David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780776619231
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Published: 2010-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

“THE POSTMODERN IMPASSE” AND CUY VANDERHAECHE’S THE ENGLISHMAN’S BOY

JENNIFER BLAIR

… We are lucky

once again, and the socius

of “le texte”

is bullshit.

–Lisa Robertson

The Weather

In The Canadian Postmodern, Linda Hutcheon identifies what she sees as a productive “paradox” that characterizes the novels she terms “historiographic metafiction.” In Hutcheon’s words, such writing is “intensely, self-reflexively art, but is also grounded in historical, social, and political realities” (13). Unlike conventional historical novels, historiographic metafictions foreground “the processes of writing, reading, and interpreting” (13) yet remain committed to the narration of the events of history and their attendant political consequences for men and women. Two decades since the publication of Hutcheon’s influential text, one wonders if the productivity of this paradox was in fact realized or if it was reduced to a simple opposition between the writing of history and the self-reflexive interpretation and critique of this writing—in other words, two aspects of one and the same phenomenon: text. Scholars may have become skilful at identifying the discursive processes of history, and may successfully argue that the contradictions within these processes signal resistances to dominant ideological paradigms, but these arguments have succeeded at the expense of a critical acknowledgement of the social experiences and effects of history, as well as a fuller appreciation of the dynamics of the active processes of time and memory. In other words, criticism has lost those aspects of “the past,” of the passage of time, that are distinct from the textual, and, with them, the fundamental tension that lies at the heart of Hutcheon’s paradox. Rather than exploring the complexity of that crucial difference between text and lived experience, critics seem to have become caught up in a somewhat limited approach that assesses the relationship between “art” and “reality” only after reducing both to their discursive qualities and functions. To borrow a disturbingly apt phrase from Félix Guattari, we have arrived at “the postmodern impasse,” where “the socius is reducible to the facts of language” (111).

Of course, as literary critics, we would be the first to point out that the “facts of language” are numerous—dense with intricacies of power and meaning that constitute, and have real consequences for, “the socius.” But what troubled Guattari specifically were the ways in which postmodernism understood these facts of language as being “reducible to binarizable and ‘digitizable’ signifying chains,” and he found fault with those postmodern theorists (Lyotard and Baudrillard in particular) “for whom the social and political have never been more than traps, or ‘semblances’” (111). In other words, Guattari criticized postmodernists for their reduction of social life to a limited conception of language. He also noted that “postmodernists have hardly said anything innovative” concerning this particular reduction of the socius, or its origins, and he ultimately scolded them for failing to recognize (or admit) that in fact this manoeuvre had its roots in the modernist tradition, including especially all “the worst aspects of Anglo-Saxon systematization” that were part of this tradition (111). For Guattari, the postmodernists’ interest in the new communications and computer

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