Date: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 01:49:15 -0500 (EST)
From: "Jonathan P. Beasley-Murray" <jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu>
Subject: Re: Deleuze and Postmodernity


[my last gasp, I think:]

And I just noticed today that in _Looking Awry_ Zizek states that the 
French don't use the term poststructuralism, either... what do they talk 
about?  I'm chewing over his version of the modern/postmodern thing, 
which seems similar to Harrison's suggestion, and somewhat similar to mine.

By the way I think I stole my final definition of the distinction
(discours/figure etc.) from Tommy Docherty (no, not the Manchester City
player of the mid-80s) in a talk he gave a while back, but I've flicked 
through hi _After Theory_ and can't see it there.

On Sun, 4 Dec 1994, Mani Salem-Haghighi wrote:

> He isn't because, to use Jon's odd 
> formula, his addressees aren't Anglo-American Postmodernists (but this 
> seems to buy into some variation on the theme of authorial intention... 
> hmmm..., don't know what to say about this...you'll have to explain.)

Institutional placement?  Doesn't seem so odd to me.

> Personally, I see no reason to buy this line of argument. Huyssen is 
> often pretty sneaky and unnecessarily Deutsch-centric. 

I don't buy Huyssen all the way myself.  He's still pretty much one of 
the old guys with mandarin tastes and all, for a start.  He makes a good 
effort (from a more or less Frankfurt School perspective) to deal with 
(rather than merely lament) the failure of the modern(ist) project--but 
that's where he's coming from (I think).

> "The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the 
> unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace 
> of good forms, the consensus of a taste [...]; that which searches for 
> new presentations, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to impart a 
> stronger sense of the unpresentable."
>           -"What is Postmodernism?" in PoMo Explained for Kids (which 
>             means that it isn't a sell out, nor is it written for money), 
>             reprinted at the end of the English PoMoCondition, p.81

Seems ahistorical and formalist to me (which Lyotard at his best isn't, 
really).
 
> love

Equally
 
> mani

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Literature Program
Duke University
jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu




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