ABSTRACT
Postmodern artists reject the aestheticist autonomy of modern art. However, while problematizing both the subjective and objective referents of art, it cannot be said that postmodernism has reduced the elitism of art, escaped from its commercialism, or abandoned itself to the interpretative will of a new political public. Hal Foster has suggested that we can distinguish two lineages in postmodernism, somewhat as follows: neoconservative postmodernism; and post-structuralist postmodernism. Neoconservatives would be surprised at being considered postmodernists rather than, say, neomodernists. Postmodernism is extremely verbal, despite its weak capacity for language; it is a master of gesticulation but otherwise inarticulate. Architecture is its empty soul; and film and literature its wandering ghosts. There is in postmodernism a certain will to willessness—a failure of nerve that gives it its nerve. The postmodernist rejection of mediations, the search for immediate presence, is haunted by the unfulfillment of this desire.
