The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

Plate 1.6 The collision and superimposition of di ferent ontological worlds isa major characteristic of postmodern art. David Salle's 'Tight as Houses',1980, illustrates the idea.Postmodernism 51a text because the perpetual interweaving of texts and meanings isbeyond our control. Language works through us. Recognizing that,the deconstructionist impulse is to look inside one text for another,dissolve one text into another, or build one text into another.Derrida considers, therefore, collage/montage as the primary formof postmodern discourse. The inherent heterogeneity of that (beit in painting, writing, architecture) stimulates us, the receivers of thetext or image, 'to produce a signification which could be neitherunivocal nor stable.' Both producers and consumers of 'texts' (culturalartefacts) participate in the production of significations and meanings(hence Hassan's emphasis upon 'process,' 'performance,' 'happening,'and 'participation' in the postmodernist style). Minimizing the authorityof the cultural producer creates the opportunity for popularparticipation and democratic determinations of cultural values, but atthe price of a certain incoherence or, more problematic, vulnerability -to mass-market manipulation. However this may be, the culturalproducer merely creates raw materials (fragments and elements),leaving it open to consumers to recombine those elements in anyway they wish. The effect is to break (deconstruct) the power of theauthor to impose meanings or offer a continuous narrative. Eachcited element says Derrida, 'breaks the continuity or the linearity ofthe discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of thefragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of thefragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality.'Continuity is given only in 'the trace' of the fragment as it movesfrom production to consumption. The effect is to call into questionall the illusions of fixed systems of representation (Foster, 1983,142).There is more than a hint of this sort of thinking within themodernist tradition (directly from surrealism, for example) and thereis a danger here of thinking of the meta-narratives in the Enlightenmenttradition as more fixed and stable than they truly were. Marx,as Ollman (1971) observes, deployed his concepts relationally, sothat terms like value, labour, capital, are 'continually breaking apartand re-attaching in new combinations' in an open-ended struggleto come to terms with the totalizing processes of capitalism. Benjamin,a complex thinker in the Marxist tradition, worked the idea ofcollage/montage to perfection, in order to try and capture the manylayeredand fragmented relations between economy, politics, andculture without ever abandoning the standpoint of a totality ofpractices that constitute capitalism. Taylor (1987, 53-65) likewiseconcludes, after reviewing the historical evidence of its use (particularlyby Picasso), that collage is a far from adequate indicator of differencebetween modernist and postmodernist painting.