ABSTRACT
Theory is never more than an extension of practice. Charles Bernstein The art and theory that I have been labelling as postmodernist are not, perhaps, as revolutionary as either their own rhetoric or their supporters’ suggest. Nor, however, are they as nostalgically neoconservative as their detractors would have it. Whether we use a model of double encoding or one of ideological “unmarking,” the point is that postmodernism has been both acclaimed and attacked by both ends of the political spectrum because its inherently paradoxical structure permits contradictory interpretations: these forms of aesthetic practice and theory both install and subvert prevailing norms-artistic and ideological. They are both critical and complicitous, outside and inside the dominant discourses of society. This kind of contradiction is what seems to me to be what shows up at those points of intersection of art and theory today, and it is these that I have been using here to suggest the basis for a poetics of postmodernism, an open and flexible descriptive structure by which to order our current cultural knowledge. Theorized from these points of intersection, a postmodern poetics would account for the theory and art that recognize their implication in that which they contest: the ideological as well as aesthetic underpinnings of the cultural dominants of today-both liberal humanism and capitalist mass culture. Despite all the apocalyptic rhetoric of a Charles Newman, a Jean Baudrillard, or an Arthur Kroker, I see little in the postmodern, as I have defined it, to warrant such statements as:
This neo-Nietzschean celebratory lament grants to the present a status that almost any past age could also have argued for itself, if it tried. While a delight to read, such rhetorical flourishes may presume too much.
