Date: Sat, 6 Apr 1996 22:02:22 +0300 (EET DST)
Subject: Re: MODERNISM? 


This joke doesn't necessary work. You may as well delete it?

First Santiago makes a confession:

" I'll put my two cents in on "postmodernism" (Incidentally,
the best introductory essay I know of on the topic is called
"Mapping the Postmodern" by Andreas Huyssen, included in his
book _After the Great Divide_ "

I never managed that Huyssen; too specific, I guess..

" For my money, the breakthrough in this mess, was Jameson's
1984 essay (same title as the book cited above) in _New Left
Review_. ... For him, if the term is to register a period
shift, a historical transition in the realm of culture, then
all its specific forms and manifestations have to be thought
in relation to the history of capitalism. "

He then concludes with Holy Berman, and Brother Ralph takes
the lead with his Eastern Sermon:

" I love Marshall Berman's work, and I prefer his broad,
sociological definition of modernism to the narrow
definition that restricts the term to a certain set of
literary productions, sometimes called High Modernism.
Berman's vision is broad and democratic. "

(He recites beautiful hegelian narrative:)

" .. modernism represents a massive social change in
history, perhaps the most decisive of all time -- modern
capitalism, the scientific revolution, the beginning of
secularization of society, the industrial revolution. ...
The mind discovers what it is in and for itself, distinct
>from its environment. Conversely, the mind becomes
increasingly more conscious of the artificiality of the
institutions it has created and learns to distance itself
>from its own phenomenology -- myth, religion, etc. Modernism
means the awakening of the human mind and the discovery of
self for self.

" Before modernism, the discovery of self reached its limits
in Diogenes or Taoism or some of the more advanced forms of
esoteric thought, but it was still impossible to fully
realize consciousness of the artificiality of human
institutions and the non-eternal nature of the world..
Praise be! Amen! "

Hallelujah! - But unfortunately Beast takes his share:

" Why should I care about played out, dried-up overeducated
snobs -- the French above all others -- who have grown so
bored with themselves and with the world, they are ready to
put an end to the Enlightenment, without bothering to
consult anyone but themselves and people just like them? How
characteristic of intellectual elites that they should
presume their own condition is everybody's. They only look
at how elites appropriate culture. They create historical
myths that apply mainly to people just like themselves.
Their categories are assumed to be everyone's. Their
problems are assumed to be everyone's. "

(Why this reminds me of Hegelian narration?) Finally Brother
Ralph exposes his protestant-hegelian theology:

" Why is it so necessary for the petit bourgeois
intellectuals -- above all the French -- to attack humanism
and the COHERENCE OF THE SELF? "

And this lamb walks out of church. Because in my version of
Eastern Orthodox Atheism there are two great roads of Holy
Enlightenmeant: besides Marx's Apocalypse there's Freud's
Gospel. Coherence of self is (as narration) and is not (viz.
it's hidden). 'Substantiality of ego' is last illusion
before enlightenment. Forget Oedipus and holy family, forget
Libido and Thanatos. But do remember topicalities of psychic
process, and do not elevate your-self into divinity. If Mind
discovers itself as both substance and subject, the other in
itself and itself in other, then why to stick only to
standpoint of subjectivity? It can never grasp its genesis -
as G.W.Fr. so powerfully demonstrates.

Yours, Jukka L



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