GENESIS OF THE ARGUMENT

THE POSTMODERN PROGRAMME results from our ongoing investigation of postmodernism at our calm and quiet site, Sixth Avenue. The avenue offers us a sharp contrast to the object of our studies. On a late afternoon, when the sun hits at a particular angle, we can feel as if we inhabit another time. The insistent alarums of the postmodern project jar this gentle atmosphere. From this contrast we take energy. The oak trees stir us to conjure images and alternatives that the worthy inhabitants of the avenue in earlier decades would have found senseless. We like to think of those predecessors as quiet presences at our conference table on postmodernism. They may keep us in touch with something of value that still lives, though it has disappeared from sight and text.

THE PROGRAMME began when in the course of a few weeks we made a dated record of our thoughts. We think of that record as our "genesis" document. There are two parts. Part One, below, ranges generally over the subject. Part Two deals with critical theory.

------------------THE "GENESIS" DOCUMENT, PART ONE------------------

In the most general terms, THE PROGRAMME is asking how we all got into this universal mess and is looking for a way for us to live in it or with it. We are not systematically searching for a way out of it. Yet in our darkest deliberations, we usually conclude by wanting some dialectic dissolve into a new phase. We return to the commonplace of terror in the postmodern over and over again. And we want to deal with it.

We begin at that momentous first gathering around a fire in the dark and endless woods. Someone became conscious of being conscious. The woods were threatening, and the light of the fire made the little group feel less endangered by the night.

Something urged one of them to talk about the beasts and swamps and deadly leaves. He or she thought (!) the story might help them all to deal with their dread. So for the first time in human history the talk around the fire began. It has never stopped. It came to be as essential to human survival as air and water and food. What is said is seen to be important, of course; but THAT it is said is clearly more important. The last word, the true truth, seems so far to have eluded us. That does not diminish the need for more talk; indeed, it increases the importance of continuing.

THE PROGRAMME, bits of light on a screen, combines the fire and the talk in the medium of our day. While it can traverse distances and reach millions, it represents the same process as that which began in the prehistoric woods.

We reject the notion that the substance of the talk is not important just because it seems to have no end or just because it cannot seem to get to the root of the matter. It is important to analyze what is said as critically and as carefully as possible. It is also important to avoid the urgency to seize a reasonable statement as an ultimate and universal finding.

We elaborate on this original picture of the folk around the fire in an essay prompted by a review of Jerome Bruner's book on cultural psychology. Bruner offers a theory of psychology in which people "make meaning" by telling stories. (30 March 1997)

21 September 1995

In THE PROGRAMME we talk about a temper and a sensibility. We mean a way of seeing things because of life's experience in a finite span of time. We do not talk about THE PHILOSOPHY OF POSTMODERNISM or THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF POSTMODERNISM or THE FINAL TRUTH ACCORDING TO POSTMODERNISM. There is a virtue in approaching the situation through felt experience as well as through a set of tenets, derived from examining the evidence. This allows openness to further developments. It says that it is acceptable to be "disloyal" to whatever we declare postmodernism to be. The postmodern contains its own dissolution: this is not a contradiction of what it is but an integral ingredient, an affirmation of it.

28 September 1995

As study goes forward in THE PROGRAMME, core concepts will come to the surface. Sometimes they will be taken from critical text and thus referenced through the bibliography and notes on it. We hope as time goes on to begin a list of core concepts in the argument. This is the mere breath of a beginning:

  1. The postmodern is not the modern.
  2. The postmodern would not be without the modern.
  3. We can identify the major values found in the modern.
  4. By doing so, we can derive contrasting values in the postmodern.
  5. The modern and the postmodern are more alike than anything prior.
  6. The postmodern too shall pass.
2 October 1995

THE PROGRAMME is cautious about stating intentional ends. But the more we read, the more we think of postmodernism as transitional. Its irresolutions satisfy our common-sense apprehension of the world we created with technology. They do not lay to rest the terror of that world. Within that lack, that pocket of nothingness, the seed of the post-postmodern may lie. Is it too hazardous to think that we could think ourselves out of the flat inadequacies of the postmodern to a better story to be told around the fire? Let THE PROGRAMME gird itself against the whiff of heroic ambition here; but let it hold out a possibility of something resembling a dialectic. Resignation in the grip of a never-finished rhizome may come to be unacceptable. This is not a manifesto. It is a hint of dissatisfaction with a logic in postmodern thought that itches mildly under the skin.

6 November 1995; updated 30 March 1997
THE GENESIS DOCUMENT, PART TWO

FLOATING FINAL FORMULATION

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