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imomus
Postmodernism has us all tied up in a big ole shibari knot. The more we struggle the tighter it gets. Better relax and let it pleasure you, then hope it'll untie you when it's done and has no more appetite.
Every time you see that some old style is 'back on the catwalks', every time some series comes back from TV heaven, every time you read that your favourite artist has opted to use vintage gear on his new album, know that Uncle Pomo has just thrown another rope around your naked body. Don't wriggle, unless you actually want to excite him more.
I've re-appropriated the old hippy zen / Oasis slogan 'Be here now!' to describe what I think of as the best attitude to postmodernism. Wake up, smell the coffee, set your watch, be here now! Not because I think postmodernism is great (although it's certainly given me a hell of a lot of fun over the years) but because that's the best way to get on to the next thing. There will certainly be a 'next thing' some day, and postmodernism will be 'the last thing'.
It's actually impossible for anyone culturally active now to be doing anything other than postmodernism. The Taliban were a postmodern version of Islam, not (as often depicted) a contemporary group who were, somehow, also living in the Middle Ages. The Stuckists are a group of postmodern figurative painters who hate mainstream postmodernist art, but whose reaction against it also falls within postmodernism. Oasis and Matmos are both postmodernist pop groups. One is not 'more' postmodernist than the other. Postmodernism is the name of the cultural period we're all in.
But I see people's attempts to 'transcend' or 'deny' this as a form of bad faith. And I think postmodernism will not be superceded by denials and reactions against its core values, but by a complete embracing of them. That's why I like pop records like Cher's 'Believe'. By embracing postmodern production, by showing that there's no contradiction between the human voice and an electronic harmoniser, between technology and emotion, between contrivance and sincerity, or confection and belief, or the engineer and the humanist, 'Believe' brings the end of postmodernism closer because it brings closer the day in which to be postmodern will be as natural as breathing. Postmodernism will disappear by becoming so accepted that it's invisible and omnipresent. Whereas all reactions against postmodernism (Stuckism, rockism, fundamentalism) only serve to make postmodernism more visible, more important, something distinct from us, ahead of us, rather than written all through us.
Personally, I think Japan will be the country which first embraces whatever comes after postmodernism, because Japan is the society currently most at ease with postmodernism. They also know a thing or two about the fun you can have with ropes.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-29 08:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-29 02:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-31 05:19 am (UTC)You're not Holden.
You're not Hamlet.
You're a RAT!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-29 08:39 am (UTC)Shot By Both Sides
Date: 2004-10-29 09:30 am (UTC)Is this what the critics mean by "timeless", that is music that never sounds dated because it is outside of the current memes or perhaps is more "classical" in that it is not trying to be cutting edge (I know that has been a topic of late). John Peel used to evaluate bands on being able to hear their influences. In the case of the Smiths he could not trace them and that yardstick is apt in this regard when the cross-fertilisation of influences creates something new but the ingredients are undetectable. So po-mo perhaps is an indication of the decline in creativity in pop. Meme-splicing can produce new things but when it is knowing and ambivalent perhaps it is hollow and just a gesture that becomes dated because of the affectation.
I feel that with all this questioning of post-modernism, you want to move away from irony and the values of pastiche and the plastic. I'd like to challenge you to write a song that is stripped down to core Momus values. I'd be interested to hear a song that is not troubled by being melodic, normative or ironic and throws away the latest plug-in trickery, not as a form of luddism but because I sometimes think that it is more challenging to write within the limitations of conformity. Can you produce something in the vacuum of timelessness ? I believe you have, but that is in the past, so what about now ? Have you written any post "Otto" works on you return to Berlin ? Please don't get me wrong I think your current work is great but I think that you are searching for something that is outside of the path you have been treading and is evident in the subject of many of your LJ postings. Re-evaluation and re-invention don't necessarily have to be revisionist.
Richard G
Re: Shot By Both Sides
Date: 2004-10-29 11:51 am (UTC)A being here "in the nowness of now" attitude could be the solution but involves leaving irony and pastiche behind.
The thing about irony and pastiche is that they're more complex than they're often given credit for being. 'This year's irony is next year's sincerity.' A word I used last year with invisible quote marks around it, I may use this year without quote marks. A feeling I claimed to feel last year in a theatrical, posturing and ironic way might become, this year, a real feeling that can make me cry real tears. Rather than being a sterile binary, the vector between irony and sincerity can be an unpredictable walk into ambiguity. The places in between irony and sincerity are rich in artistic opportunity. It's a place of fuzzy logic, of role playing, of mixed feelings and changing beliefs.
Irony has been given a bad press. People think it's a joke shop. In fact it's more like a mysterious forest or a masked ball.
Re: Shot By Both Sides
Date: 2004-10-29 01:09 pm (UTC)I was actually making a kind of distinction between "ironic" and "sincere" as that I think is the crux of the post-modern thing which we are stuck in good or bad. I am interested in you stripping away all of the techniques you have recently employed more as a kind of an experiment in contrariness. I understand the fine line that you walk between the binaries of irony and sincerity which is perhaps a critical Momus theme and this clearly enriches your work.
Thanks for explaining that you operate a kind of floating modus operandi as it never occurred to me. I love irony and am very suspicious of sincerity but sometimes it's nice to appreciate something with the ambivalence less prominent. On "Otto" I really like your song "Cockle Picker" precisely because of the unsentimental "emotion" it invokes. I guess it has been a sad week so melancholy, another Momus trademark which has been somewhat absent is a better description for the ingredient I think I was trying to articulate (it too can work on many levels ). Anyway, thanks for another great post.
Richard G
Re: Shot By Both Sides
Date: 2004-10-29 07:12 pm (UTC)“I'd like to challenge you to write a song that is stripped down to core Momus values. not troubled by being melodic, normative or ironic and throws away the latest plug-in trickery, not as a form of luddism but because I sometimes think that it is more challenging to write within the limitations of conformity. Can you produce something in the vacuum of timelessness ?”
Done. Oscar Tennis Champion, Track 14 Lovely Tree. No daylight between the ironic and sincere in that one.
tb
then one morning i woke up and i thought oedipus oedipus oedipus oedipus
Date: 2004-10-29 12:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-29 02:06 pm (UTC)Take something like brickwall mastering (http://www.loudnessrace.net/) - a technique that spans across almost all recorded musical genres. As an effect that has drained the dynamics out of pop music, even mediated the structure and progression of songs, it remains largely invisible to those not familiar with the recording process. And although this concept in nothing new to recording music, you can literally see just how far we've gone with it if you open a pop song from 1975 and a pop song from 2004 in an audio editor. Meanwhile, the only people even noticing this are fringe audiophiles and production engineers!
I really believe the technologies that arrive without the bombast of a fad or gimmick are the ones with the greatest overall impact... which is why I also think the upheaval of postmodernism will come so quietly that no one will ever know it happened. Maybe it already did :)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-29 03:52 pm (UTC)unless
Date: 2004-11-02 10:26 am (UTC)What's up in Japan...
Date: 2004-10-29 08:14 pm (UTC)I would like to start a discussion somewhere about Japan's accidental, vapid, content-less Postmodernism vs. the West's self-aware, ironic, intentionally-McLuhan-esque Postmodernism.
Intention is everything: manslaughter is not murder one. I saw a girl wearing a "Rush [Limbaugh] is Right" trucker hat in Harajuku. This was clearly accidental, but I could imagine someone doing the same Postmodern trick in the Lower East Side totally intentionally. How can you have irony when you don't have content to start with?
marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-29 09:28 pm (UTC)Happy Hallowe'en/Samhain, everyone.
W
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-29 11:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-30 12:32 am (UTC)Japan is the society currently most at ease with postmodernism
I was very struck by this statement. I wonder whether this is one of the reasons that I enjoy being in Japan as I also don't at times. If attempts to counter postmodernism only make it more apparent and visible, then I think that it may well be less visible in Japan. They're not seeing what there is to counter. At the same time, though, I've never been too convinced that postmodernism in its Western reading can be found there. I don't think these statements necessarily contradict each other.
I'm prone to looking at Japan as a historian foremost, since that's what I am. If some future archaeological team digs through the Tokyo ground, they will encounter plenty of evidence: buildings by certain architects, clothes by certain designers, CDs by certain musicians and so on. According to the tick list, these artefacts will suggest that postmodernism was alive and well in Heisei-era Japan. Of course, this list will be a reductive travesty, but that's out of our hands. What these objects won't record are the relationships between themselves and the city's inhabitants. Just as specialists once ascribed a ritual or religious significance to all those site finds that didn't have an obvious practical use, these archaeologists will be confronted with all manner of flotsam, the significance of which has slipped from memory. What do you reckon they did with this? Postmodernism, most likely.
As you say, postmodernism is just the name of the cultural era we're in, but I'm very wary of translating that directly into the Japanese context. Yes, you, me and many other people are going to encounter Japan with that in mind, but personally I found that it sort of evaporated in me over time. That was the relief and maybe also the horror.
More words have been written about the Meiji period than I care to recall, but the question posited is how and why (and of course whether) Japan managed to become such a success story in such little time. It seemed to commentators that Japan had passed directly from feudalism into industrial capitalism, an event that also caused some confusion among the country's young and eager Marxists. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Japan was actually bypassing postmodernism. Yes, we can find its trappings, but possibly not the routines.
Marxy, you write above about the trucker hat dilemma. Accidental? Probably. Your distinction between "Japan's accidental, vapid, content-less Postmodernism vs. the West's self-aware, ironic, intentionally-McLuhan-esque Postmodernism" is a good one, but what I'd like to suggest here is that maybe it's not postmodernism at all, but something else sublimating in the offing, One, of the many, distinctions between Japan (and more importantly East Asia) and the West is that the foundations of philosophical discourse are quite different. All those pesky Confucians of various hues, for example. They weren't up to nothing for two and a half thousand years.
I'm not saying that discussing postmodernism in Japan is a contemporary Orientalist conceit, but I do wonder whether its application might obscure more than it reveals about Japan, East Asia and possibly elsewhere.
Re: Japan as Postmodern
Date: 2004-10-30 07:56 am (UTC)Very well said.
We give Japan way too much credit if we just explain their exceptional case as mere "postmodern" and call it a day.
I wrote more on the subject earlier at my blog (http://www.pliink.com/mt/marxy).
marxy
Re: Japan as Postmodern
Date: 2004-10-30 05:18 pm (UTC)Postmodernism is an aesthetic, but most importantly it is an aesthetic which draws significantly from (among other things) global media and human movement. I don't think it's right to point to Japan as some enclosed, hermetic, sealed national culture which can be pointed to and called 'Japanese culture.' It denies Japan's involvement in the movement of global capital and of migration. It's also very presumptuous; it takes Japan as its unchanging subject.
Not to be picky but I also think that the critique of Japanese postmodernism as contentless is a little ridiculous, with the added consideration that this debate is being played out in English. I do not want to assume anything of its participants, but I will quote Barthes: "The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicious protection, envelops the foreigner in an auditory film which halts at his ears all the alienations of the mother tongue: the regional and social origins of whoever is speaking, his degree of culture, of intelligence, of taste, the image by which he constitutes himself as a person and which he asks you to recognize." The idea of 'real content' seems to me to rest on some fetishized notion of cultural authenticity, something beyond the pale of postmodernism. Does Japanese fashion have politics? Sure. But the politics being dealt with are not the religious right, the anti-gay lobby, or Elizabeth Dole and the drinking age; I think that the forces being negotiated with are far more insidious than that, and so resistance is far more insidious than some New Yorker walking around with an red ribbon on his lapel.
Also, Nick, you end your comments with an exhortation to accept one's own condition as being postmodern-- could you elaborate on why the end of postmodernism would be welcome? If I understand the argument right, it's that once postmodernism becomes our air and water, it cannot be struggled against; and thus, struggle is diminished and pleasure is increased. I may have misunderstood what you said but-- how is this a desirable condition?
Stuckists are not Postmodern
Date: 2004-10-31 01:42 am (UTC)http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html
Here are some excerpts:
"Postmodern art (and thought) favors... fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures)... and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.
"But--while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of The Wasteland, for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse), but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with nonsense."
Stuckism - and its launch of Remodernism - is about a meaningful holistic engagement with self and others. Enough said?
Best
Charles Thomson
Co-founder, The Stuckists
www.stuckism.com