COMMANDMENT II: REFERENCES

Charles Bernstein, The Second War and Postmodern Memory.

Charles Bernstein finds that American poets after World War II cut adrift from notions of transcendence. In a state of shock from the extremes of human destructiveness in the war, which they experienced as children, they turn instead to the detailed, the particular, the ungrand. They shun metanarratives.

Daniel R. White and Gert Hollerick, Nietzsche at the Mall: Deconstructing the Consumer.

White and Hollerick unmask "consumption" as a dreaded "universal" metanarrative that needs to be deconstructed.

Robert Alter. Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (In cooperation with Hebrew Union College), 1991.

Alter finds in his three subjects similar commitments to the finite in their investigation of religious perspectives on the immanent.

Charles Andre Bernstein. Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1994.

Using the Holocaust as his example, Bernstein argues against teleological accounts of events that imply grand, inevitable designs. He calls instead for "a history figured in terms of its most quotidian exigencies." (p. 126)

We refer to Bernstein in our examination, fifty years afterward, of the decision to drop the A-bomb on Hiroshima in an essay, To Bear the Unbearable.

Robert Darnton. George Washington's False Teeth. NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. March 27, 1997.

Darnton turns Commandment II against postmodernism itself. He accuses postmodernists of violating it. He says they err when they totalize the Enlightenment into THE grand narrative that explains all of western culture. He seeks to rescue the Enlightenment for our use today by reconceiving it as a project of a paricular time and place by a particular set of philosophes.

David Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1990.

Harvey graphically describes the fragmented nature of postmodern sensibility. He does this by means of a theory of capital accumulation. Paradoxically, and rather delightfully, this general explanation violates the very prohibition against totalistic narratives dictated by the Second Commandment.

Richard Rorty. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Rorty opposes the objectivity of the world we see. This removes the basis for attaching ourselves to big explanations that purport to be accurate descriptions of the real world outside of our own inner minds.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy; In the Labyrinth. Tr. Richard Howard. New York: Grove, 1965.

Robbe-Grillet's novels illustrate the postmodernist resistance to depicting a coherent, objective reality through represenation of related objects.

Floating "Final" Formulation: Revision One. This first major revision of the floating "final" formulation concentrates on the "metanarrative" as the central object of postmodernism's hostility. The formulation is in full accord with Commandment II.

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