Some Attributes of Post-Modernist Literature

Copyright 1997, 1998, 1999 by Professor John Lye. This text may be freely used, with attribution, for non-profit purposes.

For some further development of some of the ideas on this page, go to my page Some Post-Structural
Assumptions (post-modernism and post-structuralism are not identical, but post-modernism has a number of
post-structural elements), also Postmodernism by Mary Klages, U. of Colorado. For a brief foundational text
in post-modern thought, go to Nietzsche's "'Reason' in Philosophy" from Twilight of the Idols. If you are
looking to do some bookreading, try Postmodernism: a Reader edited, with a good introduct, by P. Waugh.
'Postmodernism' is a broad range of
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises and effects, and of its
implicit or explicit distinction between 'high' culture and commonly lived life,
responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat to the geosphere, to a world
of faster communication, mass mediated reality, greater diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent
pluralism,
acknowledgments of and in some senses struggles against a world in which, under a spreading
technological capitalism, all things are are commodified and fetishized (made the object of desire), and
in which genuine experience has been replaced by simulation and spectacle,
resultant senses of fragmentation, of discontinuity, of reality as a pastiche rather than as a weave,
reconceptualizations of society, history and the self as cultural constructs, hence as rhetorical
constructs.

There are 'postmodernisms' even more than there were 'modernisms', and not all postmodernism
partakes of all of the following attributes:

a reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the elements of modernist thought which are totalizing: which
suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e. an explanatory cohesion of experience; the result may be
1. a sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field of contesting explanations none of which can claim
any authority,
2. parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including genre and literary form,
3. the challenging of borders and limits, including those of decency,
4. the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized elements of society.

(The 'problem' with grand narratives is that they bring all of experience under one explanatory and
one implicitly or explicitly regulative order, and hence are potentially (some would say, inevitably)
totalitarian and repressive; the problem of trying to live without them is that without their explanatory frame
there is no way in which acts can be validated (once one tries, one uncovers a hidden grand narrative) other
than through the validation of pleasure or pain, some would say beauty or ugliness. It comes down to what
one believes: is living without grand narratives an act of courage and freedom in the face of inevitable doubt
and instability, or merely an opening of oneself to the worst forces of the libido and an abandonment of
necessary principles?)

a sense that life is lived in a world with no transcendent warrant, nothing to guarantee or to
underwrite our being as meaningful moral creatures. Life just is. We no longer look for a pattern. We
live between the 1's and the 0's, in the interstices of meaning; we live on the bleak terrain of an endless
uncreated happenstance universe. We may celebrate its specificity, its immediacy; or not.
Postmodernism goes different directions here.
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the writing of reflexive or meta-fiction: fiction which is in the first instance aware of itself as fiction
and which may dramatize the false or constructed nature of fiction, on the one hand, or the inevitable
fictionality of all experience, on the other.
a reaction to, refusal of, the totalizing of modernist form -- of the dominance in modernism of form
and of the idea of the aesthetic, which concept created a 'special world' for art, cut off from the variety
and everydayness of life (a negative judgment on this 'refusal' is that postmodernism simply
aestheticizes everything, see the next point)
an attempt to integrate art and life -- the inclusion of popular forms, popular culture, everyday
reality; Bakhtin's notion of 'carnival', of joyous, anti-authoritarian, riotous, carnal and liberatory
celebration, makes sense in this context and adds a sense of energy and freedom to some post modern
work
the notion of carnival, above, is taken to the limit in the idea of transgression, the idea that to live
and think beyond the structures of capitalist ideology and of totalizing concepts one must deliberately
violate what appear to be standards of sense and decency but are (if the truth were known) methods of
social and imaginative control. A more benign conception than transgression is the concept of the
paralogical: a revelation of the non-rational immediacy of life (considered thus to be implicitly
revolutionary, liberating); as with ideas such as carnival and transgression, the paralogical gives access
to the energy of the world, and allows us to experience outside of the strictures of the grand narratives
which form our usual sense of our reality.
the use of paradox, of undercutting, of radical shifts, in order to undercut any legitimization of
reality, subject, ontological ground
a refusal of seriousness or an undercutting of or problematizing of seriousness -- achieved through
such things as the above-mentioned notion of carnival, of the turning upside-down of everything, and
through the use of parody, play, black humour and wit; this refusal and these methods of undercutting
seriousness are associated as well with fragmentation, as traditional notions of narrative coherence are
challenged, undone. The 'problem' with seriousness is that is has no room for the disruptions necessary
to expose the oppressions and repressions of master narratives, in fact seriousness tends almost
inevitably to reinforce them and hence the ideologies they support; to attack seriousness does not mean,
in this context, to abandon conviction or good intentions.
a crossing or dissolving of borders -- between fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres,
between high and low culture
a sense that the world is a world made up of rhetoric -- of language and cultural constructs and
images and symbols, none of which have any necessary validity
a move away from perspectivism, from the located, unified 'subject' and the associated grounding of
the authority of experience in the sovereign subject and its processes of perception and reflection (see
next point)
a fragmentation of the self (the unified, located subject), or a disappearance or flatness -- the self, or
subject, is no longer a 'psychological' reality but henceforth a cultural construction, located rhetorically
(in terms of the kinds of language used, the subject matter, the situation), differently configured in
different situations
the dramatization to a world in which there are no depths, in which there is nothing 'under'
appearances
a greater emphasis on the body, on the human as incarnate, as physical beings in a physical world.
This is tied to postmodernism's distrust of rationalism and of the ideology of the Enlightenment. This
emphasis on the physicality of our being leads in several directions, including
1. an emphasis on chance and contingency as fundamental conditions of our being and
2. a positing of aesthetics rather than rationalism as guide to truth, hence ultimately as the ground for
ethics.
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 a rethinking of modernism's break with history. There are (at least) two directions in which this
rethinking may go:
1. a greater awareness of history as a narrative, that is, a human construct; history is accessible to us,
but only as text -- its documents are texts, its institutions are social texts. This does not mean that
history did not happen; it means that what we know as history is known to us only through what is
configured for our understandings by language, by narratives with their own shaping forces, by
figures of speech.
2. an insistence of the incarnate and the contingent, human life as located, specific, grounded in the
body and in circumstance.

Some Post-Structural Assumptions

Post-structuralism is not a school, but a group of approaches motivated by some common understandings,
not all of which will necessarily be shared by every practitioner. Post-structuralism is not a theory but a set
of theoretical positions, which have at their core a self-reflexive discourse which is aware of the
tentativeness, the slipperiness, the ambiguity and the complex interrelations of texts and meanings. There
may be some sharp differences about what 'post-structuralism' includes; I see a substantial ideological
component which others may not, for instance.
Post-structuralism is, as the name suggests, consequent upon Structuralism, with which movement one
should have some familiarity in order to understand post-structuralism.
There follow some of assumptions of post-structural thought.
I

Post-structuralism is marked by a rejection of totalizing, essentialist, foundationalist concepts.

a totalizing concept puts all phenomena under one explanatory concept (e.g. it's the will of God)
an essentialist concept suggests that there is a reality which exists independent of, beneath or
beyond, language and ideology -- that there is such a thing as 'the feminine', for instance, or
'truth' or 'beauty'
a foundationalist concept suggests that signifying systems are stable and unproblematic
representations of a world of fact which is isomorphic with human thought.

II
Post-structuralism contests the concept of 'man' as developed by enlightenment thought and
idealist philosophy. Rather than holding as in the enlightenment view that 'individuals', are sacred,
separate and intact, their minds the only true realm of meaning and value, their rights individual and
inalienable, their value and nature rooted in a universal and transhistorical essence -- a metaphysical
being, in short -- the post-structural view holds that persons are culturally and discursively
structured, created in interaction as situated, symbolic beings. The common term for a person so
conceived is a 'subject'.
Subjects are created, then, through their cultural meanings and practices, and occupy various
culturally-based sites of meaning (as family members, as occupationally and economically and
regionally defined, as gendered and of sexual orientation, as members of clubs or clients of
psychotherapy or presidents of their school parents' organization, and on and on -- every site
evoking a different configuration of the self, different language uses, different foci of value and
energy, different social practices, and so forth).

Subjects are material beings, embodied and present in the physical world, entrenched in the
material practices and structures of their society -- working, playing, procreating, living as
parts of the material systems of society.
Subjects are social in their very origin: they take their meaning and value and self-image
from their identity groups, from their activities in society, from their intimate relations, from
the multiple pools of common meanings and symbols and practices which they share variously
with their sub-cultural groups and with their society as a larger unit.

Post-structural understandings of persons are sometimes referred to as 'anti-humanist',

because they are opposed to the Humanist idea that persons are isolate, unified, largely
immaterial beings, and that humanity is transcendent, universal and unchangeable in its
essence. To be anti-humanist is not to be anti-humane, however, but to have a different
philosophical and ideological understanding of the nature of the person.
III

Poststructuralism sees 'reality' as being much more fragmented, diverse, tenuous and culturespecific than does structuralism. Some consequences have been,
1. poststructuralism's greater attention to specific histories, to the details and local
contextualizations of concrete instances;
2. a greater emphasis on the body, the actual insertion of the human into the texture of time
and history;
3. a greater attention to the specifics of cultural working, to the arenas of discourse and
cultural practice;
4. a greater attention to the role of language and textuality in our construction of reality and
identity.

IV Post-structuralism derives in part from a sense that we live in a linguistic universe. This
means, in the first instance, rejecting the traditional aesthetic, phenomenalist assumption that
language is a 'transparent' medium which hands over experience whole and
unproblematically; in a 'linguistic' universe 'reality' is only mediated reality, and what it is
mediated by is governed by such things as:

the way language works, by difference for instance;

the world of discourse which governs our knowledge and way of speaking about the subject
under discussion: we can imagine only what we can symbolize, speak of only what we have
language for, speak only in the ways our rules of discourse allow us to;
the workings of the 'master tropes' (a trope is a way of saying something by saying something
else) of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony;
the structure of ideology, which attempts to 'naturalize' power relations and our sense of how
the world is configured;
the various cultural codes which govern our understandings of our selves, our place, our
procedures;
the idea that any cultural construction of meaning will privilege some meanings or
experiences and deprivilege others, but that there will be traces of the deprivileging or
suppression of some experiences, and by looking at the cracks, the silences, the
discontinuities which ideology attempts to smooth over, we can deconstruct or demystify the
cultural meanings;
the idea that we think in terms of certain tropes, and construct meaning in terms of genres, so
that meaning is pre-channeled in certain typified, identifiable ways, which ways reveal more
about their construction of meaning than about any 'reality' beyond the rhetorical constructs.
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To put this briefly, we live in a world of language, discourse and ideology, none of which are
transparent, all of which structure our sense of being and meaning.
V

All meaning is textual and intertextual: there is no "outside of the text," as Derrida remarked.
Everything we can know is constructed through signs, governed by the rules of discourse for that
area of knowledge, and related to other texts through filiation, allusion and repetition. Every text
exists only in relation to other texts; meaning circulates in economies of discourse. This
understanding does not mean that all reality is textual, only that what we can know of it, and how
we can know, is textual, constructed through discourse, with all its rules; through symbols,
linguistic and otherwise; through grammar(s).

VI

Discourse is a material practice; the human is rooted in historicity and lives through the body.
(Why 'historicity' instead of 'history'? Because the term 'history' suggests an objectively existing,
cognitively available reality; 'historicity' implies that what we conceive of as history is tentative,
situated, contingent.)

VII

In Foucault's terms, the production of discourse, the (historical, material) way we know our
world, is controlled, selected, organized and distributed by a certain number of procedures.
Discourse is regulated by rules of exclusion, by internal systems of control and delineation, by
conditions under which discourses can be employed, and by philosophical themes which elide
the reality of discourse -- the themes of the founding subject, originating experience, and
universal mediation. Discourses are multiple, discontinuous, originating and disappearing
through chance; they do not hide the truth but constitute its temporary face. Foucault is poststructuralist in his insistence that there is no great causal flow or plan or evolution of history, that
what happens is mainly by chance.

VIII The Derridean concept of diffrance links up with Freudian suppositions and marxist ideas to
highlight concepts of repression, displacement, condensation, substitution and so forth, which,
often by following metaphoric or metynomic links carefully, can be deconstructed or revealed;
what is 'meant' is different from what appears to be meant. Meaning disguises itself. This is
essentially structuralist, one of the reasons why 'post-structuralism' cannot be understood without
structuralism.
IX Texts are marked by a surplus of meaning; the result of this is that differing readings are
inevitable, indeed a condition of meaning at all. This surplus is located in the polysemous nature
of both language and of rhetoric. It must be kept in mind that language is what is (for us as
cognizant beings), that our sense of reality is linguistically constructed. Consequently the
'meaning of it all' is continually differing, overflowing, in flux.
X

A 'text' exists as read. This 'reading' is formed, conducted, through certain mediating factors:

the present structures of discourse, hence understanding, including the present conceptions of
the discourse structures of the time of the 'writing' of the text.
the traditions of reading, and the oppositions which those traditions have made possible, of
that particular text,
the expectations dictated by the genre of the text and the tradition of genre of the reading,
the relations of meaning which are 'in' the text by virtue of its having been written at all,
modified by the fact that these relations have a certain historical existence, a local, situated,
and corporeal existence whose reality may or may not be imaginatively recoverable;
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XI

the understanding that these 'historical' relations of meaning will to some extent be
mystifying and ideologizing relations,
the understanding that insofar as texts have a surplus of meaning they tend to reveal the flaws
which the reigning discourse is attempting to mystify,
the conceptual distances between the historical discourse / ideology / cultural codes / genretraditions of the past and the historical discourse / ideology / cultural codes / genre-traditions
of the present, which distance opens up 'new' meanings which the work could not have, in a
sense, had before. Post-structuralism is deeply aware of such hermeneutic reading and also
suspicious of it, certain that meaning is historical, uncertain that it is recoverable as what it
may have meant.
At the expense of repetition, let's go again over the sorts of conflict Culler notes
deconstructionist criticism (which is a mode of or modes of post-structuralist criticism) may
look for [On Deconstruction pp. 213-215]:

1. the asymetrical opposition or value-laden hierarchy

2. points of condensation, where a single term brings together different lines of argument or sets
of values
3. the text's ecarte de soi or difference from itself -- anything in the text that counters an
authoritative interpretation, including interpretations that the work appears to encourage (this
was touched on earlier re: the cracks, silences, discontinuities, etc.)
4. self-reference, when the text applies to something else a description, image or figure that can
be read as self-description, as a representation of its own operations; one can by applying
these to the operations of the text read 'against the grain'
5. an interest in the way conflicts or dramas within the text are reproduced as conflicts in and
between readings of the text -- Texts thematize, with varying degrees of explicitness,
interpretive operations and their consequences and thus represent in advance the dramas that
will give life to the tradition of their interpretation
6. attention to the marginal -- hierarchies depend on exclusions; the marginalized is what the
text resists, and therefore can be identified by.
XII Post-structuralism is consequent on and a reaction to structuralism; it would not exist
without structuralism. Macherey's points in his critique of structuralism (1965) lay out some of
the groundwork for post-structural thought:
1. structuralism is a-historical; life and thought are historical -- they change, different relations
with different elements at different times, and so forth
2. the transfer of knowledge from one area of knowledge (e.g. linguistics) to other areas of
knowledge is questionable enterprise
3. structuralism assumes that a work has intrinsic meaning -- that is, it is 'already there' and
always there, that the 'meaning' pre-exists its realization (it is already there -- we just identify
it).
4. structural analysis is therefore the discovery of the rationality or 'secret coherence' of a text.
But this coherence is a coherence that precedes the text, or it could not form the text. For
there to be 'intrinsic meaning' there has to be a pattern or order or structure which governs
and orders and regulates the production of meaning. The text is therefore in a sense a 'copy'
of that order or structure which grounds the coherence of the text; analysis of a text is a copy
of a copy, the text is just an intermediary between the reader and the structure of rationality,
and so it 'disappears'.
5. structuralism presupposes the traditional and metaphysical notion of harmony and unity; a
work is only a work, i.e. only has meaning as an entity, only insofar as it is is a whole. This
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notion negates the reality of the material conditions of production or reception, it makes the
meaning itself unitary, is makes criticism commentary, a pointing out of the essential truth
which is embodied not in but through the work.