The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

Old Wine, New Bottles
Carravetta, Peter
Prefaces to the DIaphora: Rhetorics, Allegory, and
the Interpretation of Postmodernity. Purdue UP
"£•
Pefanis, Julian
Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille,
Baudrillard, and Lyotard. Duke UP n.p.
Perloff, Marjorie, ed.
Postmodern Genres. U of Oklahoma P n.p
Reviewed by David Thomson
Although each of these volumes attempts to
situate a discussion of postmodernism
around one key term, only Heterology
maintains a consistent focus. The essays
collected in Perloff's book vary so widely in
subject matter and approach that it requires
both Perloff's introduction and the first
offering, Ralph Cohen's "Do Postmodern
Genres exist?" to establish an adequate context
for the essays which follow. Prefaces to
the Diaphora, containing loosely related
conference papers Peter Carravetta delivered
between 1983 and 1989, is ostensibly organized
around the central term of the diaphora,
but his concept seems to be of diminishing
importance in the later chapters.
Carravetta uses "diaphoristics," which is
intended "to signify a movement akin to a
dialogue between and among forms of discourse,"
to argue for a reassessment of the
trope of allegory, beginning with a reading
of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
which he sees as an early text in the transition
from modernity to postmodernity.
Carravetta discovers in the appropriated
mythology of Gabriele D'Annunzio's epic
poem Maia (1903) a further allegory of this
transition; he reads the metamorphosis of
Ulysses into Hermes that is enacted within
the poem in terms of a displacement of the
figure of a wanderer seeking a final destination
to that of the nomad-messenger "who
is always becoming, sailing and journeying..."
In fact, Carravetta offers the figure of
Hermes as a representation of the diaphora
itself, a mediation between discrete orders
of discourse which permits a renewed dialogue
between poetry and philosophy.
Following an historical survey of avantgardes
in the twentieth century (a survey
that culminates in the elaboration of a conception
of postmodernity "characterized by
the mood of inclusion instead of the principle
of exclusion, of heterogeneity rather
than homology or autonomy," Carravetta
discussed the contributions of Jean-François
Lyotard and Gianni Vattimo to the postmodern
debate. He emphasises the openended
nature of their thought, especially
their rejection of a universal Grund and celebration
of competing, fragmented discourses;
Prefaces concludes with a tentative
sketch of a hermeneutics that can account
for the multiplicity of meanings immanent
in language, for an engagement with narrative
that does not require a reduction of it.
Julian Pefanis traces an alternative history
of postmodernism, exploring the indebtedness
of French theorists, especially Jean
Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard, to
the critical texts of George Bataille. Pefanis
demonstrates how "the emblematic concept
of the gift," that economic form found
in primitive societies but effaced in the
West by the law of production, underwrites
Bataille's model of the general economy,
the concept of symbolic exchange developed
by Baudrillard, and Lyotard's
économie libidinale. Against the imperatives
of capitalist accumulation, the gift represents
an anti-economic principle, a conspicuous
destruction of surplus wealth—
what Bataille calls dépense. Applied in
opposition to a mode of textual production
obsessed with efficiency and coherence, the
emblem of the gift signifies the réinscription
of play and non-productive discourse
in postmodernism. Heterological writing,
the privileged mode of Bataille, Baudrillard
and Lyotard, signals an assault on the rational
discourse of modernity in its tendency