ABSTRACT
For the last twenty years, perhaps since the advent of structuralism’s rejection of the “pretensions of the Cartesian…cogito” (Jameson 1972, 135), the topic of “man as the concrete universal,” to use Said’s term (1975a, 287), has hovered over our various intellectual enterprises, descending now and again to become the basis of some attack or other on the humanist tradition. Theorists of all political propensities have recently pointed out the trendiness of the subject of the “subject” in both criticism and literature. Jameson calls the fragmentation and death of the subject a “fashionable theme” of contemporary theory, marking the “end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual” (1984a, 63). Gerald Graff had earlier defined the essence of the avant-garde aesthetic in terms of “a refusal of the entire bourgeois view of reality, epitomized by the subject-object paradigm of rationalist epistemology” (1975, 321). The coincidence of the concerns of criticism and art-their shared focus on the ideological and epistemological nature of the human subject-marks another of those points of intersection that might define a postmodernist poetics. More specifically, this is a point of challenge to any aesthetic theory or practice that either assumes a secure, confident
knowledge of the subject or elides the subject completely. And both theory and art effect this challenge through their awareness of the need to situate or contextualize the discussion of subjectivity carried on by any discursive activity (including their own) within the framework of both history and ideology.
