Las P^Imas fañ° 1^9?^91

One of the conventions of writing about postmodernism is to acknowledge (or boast?) that nothing about the subject is certain, resolved or uncontentious – not its prov-enance, nor its scope, nor what category of “thing” it is (a period? a style? a movement?

a “condition” of culture?), nor its relation to modernism, the date of its presumed onset (late-thirties? 1945? mid-sixties? 1973?), its significance and value, its politics, its degree of complicity with late capitalism, whether or not it has ended yet, whether or not it ever really happened. I don’t propose to flout that convention here, but to add one more bone of contention to the list: it is a matter of dispute whether or not post-modernism can be experimental – whether or not it is avant-garde. (The two terms, experimental and avant-garde, will be used interchangeably here.)

The person-on-the-street who consumes the products of postmodern culture seems to be of two minds about it. On the one hand, postmodernism is widely reputed to be

“difficult”; on the other hand, nearly everything has been identified at one time or another as “postmodern” – “the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diagesis of a film, the construction of a record . . ., a television commercial, or an arts documen-tary, . . . the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or a critical journal” (Hebdige 1988:

182); “Disneyland, Las Vegas, suburban strips, shopping malls, mirror-glass building façades . . . the Kronos Quartet, Frederick Barthelme, MTV, ‘Miami Vice,’ David Letterman, Laurie Anderson, Anselm Kiefer, Paul Auster, the Pompidou Center, the Hyatt Regency” (Gitlin 1988: 35). If everything is postmodern, how experimental could postmodernism be?

Nor is a clear resolution of the question to be found among the theorists of post-modernism, who on this issue (as on many others) appear sometimes to be speaking at cross-purposes. J.-F. Lyotard, the philosopher who, more than anyone else, was respon-sible for introducing the idea of the postmodern to European intellectuals, associated postmodernism unequivocally with avant-gardism. Indeed, for Lyotard “postmodern-ism” is the name for the avant-garde impulse within modernism. He identified it with

BRIAN McHALE

that part of modernist art that resists being domesticated and reduced to a familiar period style – the intransigent or intractable part of modernism. It is his identification of postmodernism with the avant-garde that enables Lyotard to assert, notoriously, that “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern,” and that “postmod-ernism is not mod“postmod-ernism at its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent”

(Lyotard 1993: 13). It also explains his denunciation of the kind of eclectic post-modernism reflected in the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink catalogues I cited in the preceding paragraph:

Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: you listen to reggae; you watch a western; you eat McDonald’s at midday and local cuisine at night; you wear Paris perfume in Tokyo and dress retro in Hong Kong;

knowledge is the stuff of TV game shows.

(Lyotard 1993: 8) Lyotard associates this postmodern eclecticism – maliciously, but not incorrectly – with the name of Charles Jencks, the architecture theorist who from the mid-seventies onwards campaigned to popularize the idea of the postmodern, first among architecture practitioners, then across a range of cultural domains, including litera-ture and the visual arts. Lyotard derides Jencks, and Jencks returns the favor, labeling Lyotard’s calculated paradox of postmodernism being a nascent state of modernism “a crazy idea” (Jencks 1986: 42). Lyotard, in Jencks’s view, has simply confused his cat-egories: insofar as the avant-garde impulse has persisted into the post-1945 period it should be identified not with postmodernism but with late-modernism. Postmodernism is precisely not avant-garde – or rather, while it may preserve an experimental impulse, it dispenses with the avant-garde spirit of aesthetic intransigence and intractability, instead coupling experimentalism with values of accessibility, legibility, popularity and pleasure.

Jencks embraces the eclecticism that Lyotard denounces, but he associates it with postmodernism’s practice of double-coding. According to Jencks, postmodern artworks – such as the buildings he championed by Robert Venturi, Michael Graves, Robert A.M. Stern, Frank Gehry, and others – appeal simultaneously to two different con-stituencies: on one level, through their sophisticated reflection on modernist design, structural techniques and materials, to a minority constituency of architects and con-noisseurs; on another level, through their playful and pleasurable allusions to familiar historical styles of architecture, to a broader public of consumers. Jencks elevated this architectural practice of double-coding to a general principle of postmodernism in all the arts – something like a period style. He recognized it, for instance, in the novelist John Barth’s account of what he called the “literature of replenishment,” which “keeps one foot always in the narrative past . . . and one foot in, one might say, the Parisian structuralist present” (Barth 1984: 204). Barth identifies the literature of replenish-ment with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and the fictions of Italo Calvino, and he distinguishes it from the “literature of exhaustion”

POSTMODERNISM AND EXPERIMENT

practiced by Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov. Barth’s for-mula for replenishment, viewed from Jencks’s perspective, looks just like postmodern double-coding, while his literature of exhaustion would presumably map onto Lyo-tard’s perpetually intransigent avant-garde.

Jencks also cites Umberto Eco, whose international best seller The Name of the Rose (1980) combines specialist knowledge and ironic self-reflection with the populist pleasures of historical fiction and the detective story. The Name of the Rose exempli-fies the kind of double-coded postmodern historical fiction for which Linda Hutch-eon (1988) coined the name historiographic metafiction (see Berry, this volume). Other high-profile examples include John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), E.L.

Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and Patrick Süskind’s Perfume (1985), all of which deliver the narrative pleasures of historical fiction while at the same time reflecting criti-cally on the limits of historical knowledge and the historical imagination. Another double-coded genre is the kind of fiction that Larry McCaffery calls Avant-Pop, which he associates with such writers as Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, Ronald Sukenick, Wil-liam T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace (see Olsen, this volume). Avant-Pop, according to McCaffery, “combines pop art’s focus on consumer goods and mass media with the avant-garde’s spirit of subversion and emphasis on radical innovation”

(McCaffery 1995: xvii–xviii) – double-coding in a nutshell.

So for Lyotard, what Jencks calls postmodern is actually a faux-postmodernism, because postmodernism is by definition experimental, while for Jencks, what Lyotard calls postmodernism is really late-modernism, because postmodernism is not avant-garde or experimental in Lyotard’s sense, but double-coded. Andreas Huyssen tries to find a way out of this impasse by reframing the respective positions of Lyotard and Jencks in historical and contextual terms. The first wave of postmodernism in the sixties, he argues, was primarily an American phenomenon, affiliated with the Pop Art of Warhol and others, and genuinely transgressive, pitting the energies of popular culture against the aesthetics of an “official,” institutionalized modernism. Seen against the backdrop of its own cultural moment, this first-wave postmodernism constituted a true avant-garde (Huyssen 1986: 188–95). Seen from the perspective of Europe, however, where the mod-ernist avant-garde had never ceased to play an oppositional role in culture, the alliance of high art with popular culture in the American scene could only look like a capitula-tion to consumerism. Thus, in a sense, Jencks and Lyotard are both right, but since they respond to different cultural circumstances, they end up speaking at cross-purposes.

However, Jencks is also wrong, from Huyssen’s perspective, because by the time of which Jencks is writing, the seventies and eighties, the alliance of high and low art had lost the aesthetic and even political radicalism it once possessed and, no longer provocative, had faded into the kind of consumerist eclecticism of which Lyotard com-plains (Huyssen 1986: 195–9). By the mid-eighties, according to Huyssen, the experi-mental potential of double-coding had subsided into art world business-as-usual, and no-one could any longer be startled or edified by the mingling of high and low art.

As for Lyotard, if he was perhaps too quick to dismiss the avant-garde potential of

BRIAN McHALE

popular culture (given the right circumstances), nevertheless his caricature of postmod-ern eclecticism comes uncomfortably close to hitting the mark. Eclecticism is indeed a topos not only of everyday consumer habits in the postmodern era (“the degree zero of contemporary general culture”), but of many forms of postmodern expression – includ-ing postmodern theory itself. If one convention of writinclud-ing about postmodernism is mak-ing a show of uncertainty, another convention is the deliberately eclectic catalogue of postmodern symptoms – such as the two catalogues I sampled above in my second para-graph, one from Tod Gitlin, the other from Dick Hebdige, each of them already quoted elsewhere at least once by somebody else (Gitlin by John Frow [1997: 27–8], Hebdige in the Wikipedia entry for postmodernism). The same aesthetic of eclecticism is discern-ible everywhere in postmodernist fiction, for instance in the topos of the miscellaneous assemblage, such as the barricade of consumer goods and tshotshkes erected against the Indians in Donald Barthelme’s “The Indian Uprising” (1965), or the sedimentary strata of detritus covering Slothrop’s desk in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).

At another level, eclecticism is reflected in the postmodern aesthetics of the mashup, in the sense that this term has acquired in digital music remixing, where two or more preexisting tracks are mixed together to produce a new, hybrid track (as in Danger Mouse’s celebrated mashup [2004] of the Beatles’ White Album with the rapper Jay-Z’s Black Album). The digital mashup aesthetic is anticipated by genre mashups in the print medium, such as Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979), David Mitch-ell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), or Robert Coover’s “Phantom of the Movie Palace” (1987), where a bored projectionist finds a way of layering films of different genres to produce

“thick collages of crashing vehicles or mating lovers or gun-toting soldiers, cowboys, and gangsters all banging away in unison” (Coover 2007: 22). In less ambitious mani-festations, the mashup aesthetic yields amusing literary gags such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009).

Scaled up to the proportions of an entire storyworld, eclecticism becomes the organ-izing principle of postmodern representations of the city, for instance in Ridley Scott’s seminal science-fiction film, Blade Runner (1982), or in William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels from the eighties and nineties. At this scale, the postmodern topos of eclec-ticism converges with what Michel Foucault called heterotopia. Inspired by Borges’s account of the impossible organizing system of an apocryphal Chinese encyclopedia, Foucault speculated about a kind of spatial disorder

where fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension . . . of the heteroclite; . . . in such a state, things are “laid,” “placed,”

“arranged” in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all.

(Foucault 1970: xviii) This is the kind of spatial (dis)order – eclecticism realized at the level of the world itself – that characterizes a number of postmodernist texts, conspicuous among them Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) – not coincidentally, one of John Barth’s prime

exam-POSTMODERNISM AND EXPERIMENT

ples of double-coded “literature of replenishment.” It is here, if anywhere, that Lyo-tard’s postmodernism of the perpetual avant-garde converges with Jencks’s postmod-ernism of double-coding, pleasure and popular appeal.